TODAY: In 1926, Agatha Christie disappears from her home in Surrey. On December 14, journalist Ritchie Calder finds her staying at a Harrogate hotel under her husband’s mistress’s surname.
- “Neither exile nor home could ever offer shelter from heartbreak or the senseless violence of war.” Tareq Baconi on the repeated exile of his Palestinian refugee family. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Janet Rich Edwards explains how medieval Catholic mystic Marguerite Porete inspired her debut novel. | Lit Hub Craft
- “In death, all things are possible. It’s up to each of us to decide.” Hannah Kauders meditates on grief, translation, and Fátima Vélez’s Galápagos. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy on playing piano under big West Texas skies. | Lit Hub Music
- Hwang Bo-Reum recommends little ways to cultivate your reading (and writing) life. | Lit Hub Advice
- “the American PhDs, eager to investigate this part of the world so often plagued by bursts of inter-ethnic violence.” Read “they descend upon us,” a poem by Selma Asotić. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “My memories are pressed into clay just as soft as anybody’s. Do not think I consider myself some kind of biographer.” Read from Lauren Rothery’s new novel, Television. | Lit Hub Fiction
- In defense of Olivia Nuzzi (sort of): “American Canto is a sad and bizarrely told story about a motherless girl who technically did have a mother well into adulthood, and a daddy’s girl whose sanitation worker father did his best but could not protect her from her abusive, alcoholic mother.” | The Nation
- Jessi Jezewska Stevens considers how recent novels about AI reflect our understanding of the technology—and our humanity. | The Dial
- “The question mark has a bad reputation. It’s unruly, a rebel feeding on chaos.” Grace Byron explores the issue of questions in Evangelical Christianity. | Granta
- Wyatt Williams considers a new biography of Denis Johnson alongside the new adaptation of Train Dreams. | The New York Times Magazine
- Alexis Clements meditates on the predicament of the creative artist today by way of Alison Bechdel’s Spent. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today.” On reading (and other performativities, perceived or actual). | The New Yorker
