TODAY: In 1929, Milan Kundera is born. 

• “Even as she does not mean to comfort, I feel her — here, still right here, to tell us how it really is.” Rachel Kushner on the stories of Clarice Lispector. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Lee Martin on the challenges (and joys) of writing a sequel to a 20-year-old novel: “Writing a sequel is like having a long-term visitor staying in your house.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Mike Drucker recalls the best worst speech at his Super Mario themed-wedding. | Lit Hub Humor
• Jessie Chaffee on Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” and living in the shadow of long COVID. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Amy Shearn asks, can writers even remember how to read for fun? | Lit Hub Craft
• “My grandmother caught cousin Gisela on the couch with the plastic slipcovers that would squeak whenever anybody sat down.” Read “Jailbreak of Sparrows,” a poem by Martín Espada from the collection Jailbreak of Sparrows. | Lit Hub Poetry
• The 26 new books out today include work by Jeanne Thornton, Amy Gerstler, Anton Solomonik, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• This story could be called ‘The Statues.’ Another possible name is ‘The Murder.’ And also ‘How to Kill Cockroaches.’” Read from Clarice Lispector’s Covert Joy: Selected Stories. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “What makes Sebald fascinating even decades after his death is the way he marks out possible lines of resistance—not in the traditional sense of protest, witness, and activism (all of which, it goes without saying, remain vital and necessary) but through other means altogether.” On W.G. Sebald’s Silent Catastrophes. | The New Republic
• Read Joan Didion’s notes on therapy to John Gregory Dunne. | The New Yorker
• Max Norman on AI generated fiction: “This fossil of human, and copyrighted, writing is perhaps the only interesting metafictional moment in the piece.” | The Drift
• Melanie McFarland on the battle to save America’s public libraries. | Salon
• Simon Wu explores what fiction has to do with playing Mario Kart and Las Vegas. | Los Angeles Review of Books

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