TODAY: In 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy sets off on a pilgrimage to a monastery disguised as a peasant. 

• Nan Z. Da explores King Lear, Maoist China, and the unpredictable nature of power. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Caroline Fraser on environmental contamination, violence, and how Tacoma became a hotbed of crime and kidnapping in the 1920s. | Lit Hub History
• B. Pietras considers the works of Sylvia Townsend Walker: “They are, in short, queer historical fictions—albeit ones written before the genre had a name.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• This week’s new books include titles by Kyra Davis Lurie, Jeff Weiss, and Betsy Golden Kellem! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Geoff Dyer, Ivy Pochoda, Megan Giddings and more authors take the Lit Hub questionnaire. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Jess Walters reveals how many breakfasts he eats while writing. | Lit Hub Craft
• Jonathan Parks-Ramage explores books with fantastically disastrous party scenes by Edward St. Aubyn, Raven Leilani, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “I had discovered a way forward for my work—and life—where, in the meeting of fiction and fact, art and biography, a new form of freedom emerged.” Megan Hunter finds creative freedom in fusing fiction and biography. | Lit Hub Biography
• “The snow—a heavy blanket smothering roofs, roads, onion fields, pasture. But Vic’s main concern is the roofs.” Read from Harris Lahti’s new novel, Foreclosure Gothic. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “M said, ‘I don’t care what they do to me. Only God decides.’ He was both lying and telling the truth.” Liv Veazy writes a dispatch from immigration court. | n+1
• Poet Tom Sleigh pays tribute to Christopher Merrill, “a latter-day Herodotus, interested in everything, dismissive of nothing.” | Words Without Borders
• Why it matters that the Mark Twain Papers and Project at UC Berkeley lost its National Endowment for the Humanities funding. | San Francisco Chronicle
• Former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden discusses her firing. | Publishers Weekly
• Jennifer Wilson on what happens when a writer learns to become an intimacy coordinator. | The New Yorker
• Julia F. Christensen explores the science and psychology behind creative flow states. | Aeon

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