TODAY: In 1896, Dodie Smith, English children’s novelist and playwright best known for the novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, is born.   “our concealer, we call it industrial lighting, / with no desire to feed another, with ten free articles / monthly remaining, our headshots appearing.” Read Peter Mishler’s poem “Tunnel Vision,” from his new...

Rachel Khong’s Real Americans, Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, and Karen Valby’s The Swans of Harlem all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction 1. Real Americans by Rachel Khong (Knopf) 4 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Real Americans...

Columbia has always had to compete with Manhattan for the loyalty of its students. Its full name is Columbia University in the City of New York, and the experience of living in America’s most cosmopolitan city frequently affects its students more deeply than anything that happens inside the classroom. The intensity of New York makes it easy for an undergraduate...

I came to Wangen, in southern Germany, to meet Thomas Walther, a 76-year-old retired judge with piercing eyes, long gray hair, and dark bushy eyebrows. His shadow loomed large over the 2020 trial of former Nazi SS concentration camp guard Bruno Dey, even though he never once set foot inside the Hamburg courtroom. Without Walther and the tale of perseverance...

To what wide, deep, clean, carpeted, deforested multiuse conference room would you compare this valley, this vale, this trench, where the vertebrates, world-weary, checking their wearables, dig in their gutters, their spoons in the loam, to carve out their shelters, their compounds, their holes, their affordable housing for loyal staffers,...

Designer Like Flavor Flav taking Sweetie to Red Lobster on their first date, during the first season of Flavor of Love. I forget his order. But I learned how happiness comes in small things. I think about seafood tanks in Hong Kong restaurants. How summers ago, at Dim Sum, my grandpa and I watched the tanks together. How the abalone and inches...