The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1930, Harold Pinter is born.
- As if we didn’t love her enough, Lydia Davis explains that if she wasn’t a writer, she’d devote herself to climate activism. | Lit Hub
- “American gunmakers made 1.9 million AR rifles for sale in the United States in the year after Sandy Hook, the most they had ever manufactured in a single year.” On America’s culture war over the AR-15. | Lit Hub Politics
- Revisiting Achmat Dangor’s Booker shortlisted novel, Bitter Fruit, an unflinching novel of South African history and inheritance. | Lit Hub Literary Criticism
- Gabrielle Bellot on Roaming, the graphic novel whose slice-of-life normalcy provides “a subtle fuck-you to book-banners.” | Lit Hub
- “Why did the intelligence community and the Pentagon go to extremes in pursuing such embarrassing ‘research’?” On the CIA’s Project MKUltra, mind-control research, and the human cost of “secret science.” | Lit Hub History
- “It’s this kind of writing that helps me develop more of the thing that it seems I’ve always lacked: empathy.” John J. Lennon on what it’s like to be a journalist in prison. | Esquire
- Michelle Santiago Cortés considers the enduring appeal of the art book. | Dirt
- Author and performer Echo Brown, whose genre-fluid YA novels blend memoir and magical realism, has died at 39 after a long battle with illness. | Publishers Weekly
- “Early eighteenth-century readers cannot necessarily have been secure in their ability to understand the books they read.” Abigail Williams on misunderstanding Greek and Latin in the eighteenth century. | Lapham’s Quarterly
- Is climate change transforming literature and poetry? | Capital and Main
- A surviving fragment of the original draft of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men—much of which was eaten by the writer’s dog, Toby—is going up for auction next month. | Guardian
