Why Do We Keep Murdering Our Darlings?

Why is everyone killing off their main characters? In the academic year 2021-2022 at the liberal arts college where I teach, I was startled by the trend. A plot contagion. Nothing is off limits, I said to my short story

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Lit Hub Weekly: June 8 – 12, 2026

Round two of our Best of the Best Books Reading Challenge ​is underway with 50 of the greatest summer novels of all time!​ | Lit Hub Helen Bain follows in Sylvia Plath’s footsteps from Paris to Wellesley.| Lit Hub Biography

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“Our Damage Doesn’t Define Us.” What We Owe to the Natural World and Each Other

Once a year, I google the name of a man who will always be a stranger to me. In 2008, my former spouse discovered this man lying behind the fast-food restaurant where they both worked, bleeding to death from what

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Ada Ferrer on “Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter”

“People are buffeted byhistory sometimes in ways that they don't realize. Ourfamily was buffeted by these forces that were much greater than us.” The post Ada Ferrer on “Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter” appeared first on Public Books.

Megan Cummins·Jun 10, 2026

Hyperallergic

Sarah Schulman’s Four Decades of Lesbian Fiction

“Nothing stops me except the publishing industry,” quipped the novelist and AIDS historian, who cut her teeth as an East Village journalist writing for queer and feminist papers.

Lakshmi Rivera Amin·Jun 11, 2026

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The Paris Review

What Is Poetry? Chelsey Minnis’s Frying Pan Full of Diamonds

“For the past twenty-five years, she has waged a sustained assault on the ideology of poetic sincerity.”

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The Rumpus

A Writerly Respect For Death - The Rumpus

Now I realize it is a dazzling, sunny afternoon in San Francisco. People are no doubt reading books at Zeitgeist as I advised them to this morning.

Michael Berger·Jun 21, 2009·4 min read