TODAY: In 1850, Honore de Balzac dies.

• “I am searching for that state just before individual languages are dismantled—freed from their meanings and finally annihilated.” Yoko Tawada considers language as a destabilizing force. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Neda Maghbouleh responds to living amid deportations, ICE seizures, and Israel’s attack on Tehran. | Lit Hub Politics
• Ed Simon on Hiroshima at 80 and the enduring impact of the atomic bomb on creative production. | Lit Hub History
• Priyamvada Ramkumar on the significance of dialect, Tamil literature, and bringing Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True to English-speaking readers. | Lit Hub On Translation
• “Most writers need day jobs. But I fled to mine when I believed I could never be a writer at all.” Nalini Jones on how working in music helped her write a novel. | Lit Hub Craft
• Akwaeke Emezi considers the making of beauty (and the beauty of nothing). | Lit Hub Memoir
• What can Aztec philosophy teach us about finding happiness? “With the pursuit of happiness comes the pursuit of its opposite.” | Lit Hub History
• “Should you wish to witness man’s depravity, like a daily slap in the face, you must come to the forest.” Read from Jeyamohan’s collection, Stories of the True. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Matt McManus tries to make sense of Cormac McCarthy’s politics. | Jacobin
• Chris Smalls talks to Ella Fanger about solidarity between Palestine and American labor movements, the Freedom Flotilla, and his experience in Israeli prison. | The Nation
• “Those people are doing something completely different than you are trying to do.” Lincoln Michel reminds us of the power of working on your work, even in a sea of AI slop. | Counter Craft
• Jiménez Enoa tells the story of La Bolita, Cuba’s wildly popular—and illegal—daily lottery, and its cartel-like underground administration  (translated by Lily Meyer). | Words Without Borders
• Angelina Eimannsberger asks if the internet has delivered us into a golden age of reading. | Public Books
• “Igno-fiction does not lionize human civilization in our present moment. It understands how small a field of vision this offers, and rejects that self-imposed limitation on prose.” Greta Rainbow speculates about the next great literary movement. | Dirt

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