TODAY: In 1909, Franz Kafka’s short story “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” is published in the Prague newspaper Bohemia . Hernan Diaz explains why his new novel isn’t a dystopia : “Similar to Diaz’s debut In the Distance , his new work can feel like social theory masquerading as old school adventure.

This is by design.” | Lit Hub In Conversation What did Gertrude Stein, T. Eliot and Joan Didion really mean?

On the histories of literature’s most famous lines. | Lit Hub Criticism On the complicated and beautiful relationship between a researcher and a librarian . | Lit Hub Craft Nina Schuyler talks to Jane Ciabattari about rivers, rights of nature, and her new book, Open the Floodgates . | Lit Hub In Conversation “Antiblackness gestures to describe the indescribable.” How antiblackness functions as a social, historical and cultural phenomenon . | Lit Hub Politics The 22 new books out today include titles by Min Jin Lee, Hernan Diaz, Ayad Akhtar, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists “What if writing were fun?” and other questions with Robert Kolker . | Lit Hub Craft “Like Lucie, I had qualms about teaching, though mine had nothing to do with eros.” Read from Ayad Akhtar’s new novel, The Radiance . | Lit Hub Fiction A concerned group of writers—including Claire Messud, Amitava Kumar, Katie Kitamura, and Alexander Chee— have signed an open letter to the University of the South in protest of the abrupt termination of Leah Stewart, the director of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. | Sewanee Writers “I haven’t yet read the one where Shane is a kitten and Ilya adopts him, but it’s on my TBR list.” Jen Ortiz chronicles nine months of Heated Rivalry fanfic obsession . | The Cut Camille Ralphs meanders through the landscape of A Writer’s Life . | Poetry Maya Man applies the lessons of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism to Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields music festival. | Dirt What is art in the age of content? “A 15-year-old casually told me that culture is online and really nowhere else.” | The MIT Press Reader Mahika Dhar explores the “fluid nonsensicality” of brainrot . | Public Books Daniel Swift considers the poetics (and neuroscience) of fatherhood. | Aeon