TODAY: In 1919, Sylvia Beach opens the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris.
We need your help to continue our essential coverage of the literary world. Lit Hub Members get an ad-free reading experience, exclusive newsletters, editors’ recommendations, early book giveaways, and our classic Joan Didion tote. | Support Lit Hub today
“I wanted to notice actively rather than reflectively, to use my body to write and not just write about my body.” Traci Brimhall on how her poetry has transformed as chronic illness shifts the pacing of her life. | Lit Hub Craft
“In autumn, in anticipation of the oncoming cold season, the beasts’ bodies were covered with a shiny, golden coat of fur.” Read from Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel. | Lit Hub Fiction
With breathtaking descriptions of falcons, gazelles, and trained cheetahs, the poems in Fate the Hunter capture the drama and tension of the hunt while offering meditations on fate, mortality, and death.
“Joan was thus twice disappointed: in love and literature. New York must’ve felt like a failure to her—to have come so close and then not to have made it.” Lili Anolik on Joan Didion’s first love—Noel Parmentel Jr. | Vanity Fair
“In its highest aspirations, the studiolo, as developed by humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne, is a sanctuary for self-cultivation.” Andrew Hui on the emergence of the private study. | Public Domain Review
On attempts to communicate with animals (and why corporate tech will not save us): “All that now separates us from enlightenment is a few more rounds of funding.” | The Baffler
FROM FORMER US POET LAUREATE BILLY COLLINS
A wondrous new collection of 60 poems focused on the joys and mysteries of daily life. Water, Water asks us to slow down and glimpse the elevated in the ordinary, the odd in the familiar.
SECRETS PULLED THEM APART. CAN THE TRUTH BRING THEM BACK TOGETHER?
After an injury, elite ballerina Allie Rousseau returns to her summer home to heal and recover. But the memories she’s tried to forget rush in and threaten to take her under. From the #1 NYT bestselling author of Fourth Wing comes a moving new novel of taking risks, following your heart, and second chances at love.
