The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1916, Italian novelist and short story writer Natalia Ginzburg (who also secretly edited an anti-fascist newspaper during World War II) is born.
- Hattie Williams recommends novels about age-gap relationships by Kirsten Reed, Coco Mellors, Jenny Erpenbeck, and more. | Lit Hub Reading List
- “Dear Fanny, I know you’re dead…” Ezra Fox on working with Fanny Howe on her last book. | Lit Hub
- “There are certain books where…the pleasure there isn’t really the ending but rather the journey.” In praise of re-reading. | Lit Hub Craft
- Peter Wortsman on the almost impossible task of deciding which beloved books to discard or save. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Deborah Williams on finding hope in the stories of Zona Gale: “Gale’s stories imagine an anti-capitalist vision of ‘sodality’ that could extend across the world, if only women were in charge.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Rebecca Chace on Matsuo Bashō and the life and death of her mother, the poet Jean Valentine. | Lit Hub Travel
- “The city was the color of oxidized blood. She was standing before the sliding doors, which opened and closed, closed and opened.” Read from Kyung-ran Jo’s novel Blowfish, translated by Chi-Young Kim. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Emily Zarevich explores the literary origins of serendipity. | JSTOR Daily
- Read the epistolary relationship between The New Yorker and John Updike. | The New Yorker
- Why, when it comes to writing, flow is only the beginning: “If you’re a professional writer, then writing should be easier for you, right? But creativity research shows that successful creativity is effortful.”. | The MIT Press Reader
- Gabriel N. Rosenberg talks to Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, about the question of timeless species. | Public Books
- How a physicist and an audio engineer (possibly) solved a Pacific Northwest horror. | Atlas Obscura
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