TODAY: In 1810, Lord Byron swims across the Hellespont, a tumultuous strait in Turkey, just as legendary Greek hero Leander supposedly swam the same four-mile stretch.
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Sam Weller on Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic: “The Martian Chronicles is a serious book about serious human themes. It is science fiction as a reflection of modernity.” | Lit Hub Criticism
What does it take to write a cookbook? Jenn Sit, editorial director of cooking at Clarkson Potter, talks culinary inspiration and new food canons. | Eater
“Kemp’s concentration camps literalize gender expectations as compulsory, inescapable structures in which people aren’t individuals but representatives of an ideal.” Arielle Isack considers the heteropessimism of Sophie Kemp’s fiction. | The Baffler
Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses family history, otherness, and the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. | Democracy Now!
“It is the daily, diaristic churn that gives her unloosed first novel the sense of a fully textured fictional world.” Anne Enright examines the relationship between Helen Garner’s fiction and her diaries. | London Review of Books
“What’s undeniable is that 4chan helped form the content ecosystem as we know it.” Kyle Chayka on the life, death, and disastrous legacy of the infamous imageboard. | The New Yorker
“Allowing re-creation of known stories by new authors gives these monsters an afterlife of their own, leaving lasting impacts on the genre for decades, or even centuries to come.” Olivia Pavao on the public domain as horror hero. | Public Books
