TODAY: In 1896, French poet Paul Verlaine dies.
- Gloria L. Huang on understanding herself and her family through The Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “Miles tells him he’s the man on the marquee, but the cop assaults him with his stick nonetheless.” Irvin Weathersby Jr. examines the effortless racism of America’s criminal justice system. | Lit Hub Politics
- What will you preserve in the face of climate crisis? Eiren Caffall on the role of museums during times of ecological disaster. | Lit Hub Climate Change
- “For the first time since I started submitting stories to literary journals, I found myself asking: wait…what kind of book do I actually want to write?” Kevin Maloney on Henry David Thoreau, Kurt Vonnegut, and rewriting his life story across multiple books. | Lit Hub Craft
- How ancient Roman coins reveal the human stories of those who made them. | Lit Hub History
- “There was the sound of gunshots going off somewhere in the distance. But there was no reaction to them on the young girl’s face.” Read from Heather O’Neill’s novel, The Capital of Dreams. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Ariel Dorfman on regret, the day Salvador Allende was overthrown, and building “a tomorrow where we are not condemned to mourn those whose only sin was to fight for a more decent and just world.” | The New York Times
- In an essay from 2022, Louise Glück considers writing and transformation. | The New Yorker
- “I never realized how similar my relationship to language was to religious faith, taking it as a given that words mean something.” Daisy Alioto on Conclave, The Brutalist, and secret names. | Dirt
- Mosab Abu Toha talks to Amy Goodman about ongoing genocide in Gaza: “I mean, the painful thing is that we are talking about things today and next year, what happened, that we are talking about the same thing, the same losses, or even worse.” | Democracy Now!
- Stefan Gužvica explains why we shouldn’t believe everything we read about communism. | Jacobin
- How Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumous novel, The Life of Herod The Great, came to bookshelves this year. | NPR
