THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1619, French novelist, playwright, epistolarian and duelist Cyrano de Bergerac is born. Today, he’s best known for inspiring Edmond Rostand‘s play, Cyrano de Bergerac.  

• Are we reviewing ourselves to death? “If someone tells me something nice, great, but otherwise, I’ve done my part. I made you a thing, world. I gave you a piece of myself.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• “She held all the possibilities at once, suspended in uncertainty.” Stories from America’s caregiving crisis. | Lit Hub Health
• Ronen Givony traces the ascent of Pitchfork and the early days of online music criticism. | Lit Hub Music
• Jess deCourcy Hinds celebrates the librarians who inspired her for International Women’s Day. | Lit Hub Libraries
• Saba Sams’ Gunk, Vigdis Hjorth’s Repetition, and Terry Tempest Williams’ The Glorians all number among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• Benjamin Hale explains the process of turning a magazine article into a book. | Lit Hub Craft
• “I think part of the role of ambiguity relates to my own ambivalence. I don’t know what to make of things.” Larry Sultan on art and ambiguity. | Lit Hub Art
• “I wish you green-blue walks along / the river’s edge, the verge, the itch / of wishing quelled by knowing well—” Read “French Walk,” a poem by Anna Lena Phillips Bell from the collection Might Could. | Lit Hub Poetry
• “Aphrodite perched on her rock at Paphos, and looked out at the Cyprian sea. No wonder she always came here when one or another of the gods had irritated her.” Read from Natalie Haynes’s novel, No Friend to This House. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “‘Everything I wrote about…is, sadly, reality,’ he asserted in a 1978 essay about the book.” On S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh and the violent reality of the Nakba. | NYRB
• Why you should care about your right to anonymity online in the face of “unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship.” | The Intercept
• Thomas Morton remembers his friend and Tyrant founder, Giancarlo DiTrapano. | The Paris Review
• Box Hill author Adam Mars-Jones and Pillion director Harry Lighton on the process of translating the novel into the film. | Publishers Weekly
• How masculinity, whiteness, and Britain’s post-colonial crisis manifested during the 1950s in London’s Notting Hill. | The MIT Press Reader