TODAY: In 1855, Victor Hugo dies. 

• Hari Kunzru reflects on Edward Said’s “startlingly contemporary” Culture and Imperialism at 3o. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “In the end we fucking smashed the arse out of it.” Noel and Liam Gallagher on when Oasis toured America. | Lit Hub Music
• What’s on Alison Bechdel’s TBR? Sarah Schulman, Urvashi Vaid, Joan Didion, and more! | Lit Hub Criticism
• “A study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
• Maris Kreizman explains why AI slop is so much sloppier than anything a human could write. | Lit Hub Technology
• Rufus Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt on the magic of Montauk, New York: “The beach is the divide between one world, the dry, and another, the wet. It is a mythical place of transformation.” | Lit Hub Art
• Debbie Urbanski on the invasive expectations of book publicity and why writers shouldn’t feel obligated to share too much. | Lit Hub Craft
• “The girls were sleeping—they had fought so hard over whose turn it was to take the top bunk that in the end they were both in the bottom, sleeping head to foot.” Read from Honor Jones’s new novel, Sleep. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “By her telling, those who want to lead a democratic country over the brink into authoritarian tactics begin by intending to deceive others, succumb to self-deception, and fall eventually into the atmosphere of ‘defactualization.’” On Trump, fascism, and Hannah Arendt’s essay, “Lying in Politics.” | Public Books
• “Telling one’s story in one’s own understanding, reclaiming it, repositions refugees as actants and not just passive victims of violent historical currents.” Peter Sloan discusses his new study of refugee literature. | JSTOR Daily
• Maggie Nelson revisits Michelle Tea’s “achievement in transmitting the conjoined rush of being young, being high, being in love, and becoming a writer,” Valencia. | The Paris Review
• What that AI generated book list reveals about the current plight of journalism. | Slate
• James Hannaham on Essex Hemphill’s (profane, transgressive, sexy, bold) poetic legacy. | Poetry
• The Institute of Museum and Library Services is safe after a federal court ruling (for now). | Hyperallergic 

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