“We were trapped within a single moment: always in danger, always waiting, and always struggling to survive.” Husam Maarouf on why he founded Gaza Publications.​| Lit Hub

How following Octavia Butler’s advice guided Clarence A. Haynes to write a novel. | Lit Hub Craft

Casey Michel explores the decline of American democracy (and the rise of the oligarch class). | Lit Hub Politics

Chang-Rae Lee's A Tender Age, Virginia Eubanks' A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving, and Téa Obreht's Sunrise all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks

On the roots of agency, for humans and other creatures alike: “For us humans, who are so sensitive to estimations of authority and might, a lot hangs on whether we believe another can take an active role in affecting something.” | Lit Hub Nature

“Among all the far-off places, and all the deserted and unknown cities, among all the lawless, godless regions, the Guayrá was an oasis.” Read from Marina Closs’s novel The Depopulation, translated by Thomas Bunstead. | Lit Hub Fiction

David Hollingshead breaks down the war between humanists and the humanities. | Defector

On luxury and seduction in a new English translation of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s The Three-Cornered Hat. | Asymptote

Elizabeth Brogden examines the role of heterotopic literature in the era of content creation. | Full Stop

What can we learn from a dead goliath grouper? “The equation of thought with abstraction, starting with Descartes’s cogito and continuing to our current data-heavy abstracted moment, rejects what we know in our bones and feel in our gut.” | Los Angeles Review of Books

Sam Huber considers the late feminist theorist Kate Millet’s parallel career as a sculptor. | New York Review of Books