TODAY: In 1850, Honoré de Balzac marries Ewelina Hanska, whom he met after she wrote him a letter criticizing his work. 

• Torrey Peters on why she’d build saunas if she wasn’t a writer, the first book she fell in love with, and more! | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Raphael Cormack explores the utopian dreams of early 20th-century occultists: “The miracle men of the 1920s and 1930s talk about hope and progress, but their stories were often tinged with that darkness.” | Lit Hub Religion
• “We all have layers; we are all actors playing our parts.” Alice Austen on writing character like an actor. | Lit Hub Craft
• Karen Russell’s The Antidote, Helen Garner’s How to End a Story, and Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• Chris Campanioni recommends books on migration that experiment with point of view by Olga Tokarczuk, Dubravka Ugrešić, Anna Seghers, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• On the life and work of an overlooked Victorian-era women’s rights activist: “Far ahead of her time, Annie Besant foresaw that reproductive rights were worth fighting for, codifying in law, and unceasingly defending.” | Lit Hub Biography
• James A. Warren on the origins and lasting impact of the Vietnam War. | Lit Hub History
• “She had committed the unforgivable sin: she had been found out. She got up and went to the monastery door.” Read from John Broderick’s novel, The Pilgrimage. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “That’s what makes speculative fiction so powerful, it’s a genre that twists and subverts and amplifies. It can shake us awake.” Silvia Park and Kelly Link discuss the power of speculative fiction. | Reactor
• Devin Griffiths and Zak Breckenridge revisit Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind. | Public Books 
• Colm Tóibín on how Mary McCarthy recreated herself on the page in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. | New York Review of Books
• Meta has succeeded in blocking Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee, from “promoting or further distributing copies” of Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, her tell-all memoir about her time at the company. | The New York Times
• “Who is getting fired up to read this crap?” Tom Ley considers The Free Press. | Defector
• Bruce Robbins asks, “What is the [Trump] administration so frightened of?” in regards to student protests at Columbia. | Los Angeles Review of Books

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