8 Best Articles on Literature
The most useful articles on literature from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
Top 5 Literature Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved on literature by Refind users in 2023 so far.
How to ...?
How to gain more from your reading
There’s more to words than meets the eye. Deepen your appreciation of literature through the art of slow, attentive reading
«From reading deeply, you gain experience as well as knowledge: you gain from reading literary works in all their unique particularity.»
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles on literature—all under 10 minutes.
The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are The Most Important -
The antidote to overconfidence is our relationship with knowledge. The antilibrary is the solution according to Nassim Taleb.
«we underestimate the value of what we don’t know and overvalue what we do know, we fundamentally misunderstand the likelihood of surprises.»
Native Lit is more than a marketing term
Its use is just another fence, and we’re busting them down.
How Much Medieval Literature Has Been Lost?
An ecological model suggests islands are better at preserving literature as well as species
American Literature is a History of the Nation’s Libraries
The history of American literature is the history of the nation’s libraries. These have changed over time, from mere depositories of books meant for circulation where patrons, driven by taste and c…
The Physical Traits that Define Men and Women in Literature
An analysis of 2,000 books and how body parts are described, by gender.
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles on literature.
The death of literature
We have fallen out of love with good writing
«The paradox of this mystic inner quality is that its depth gets expressed by what we think of as a superficial quality: style.»
The Favorite Literary Work of Every Country Visualized on a World Map
Begun by user "BackForward24" and crowdsourced through Reddit, this map of the world illustrates the most beloved/popular book of each country by pasting a scan of the book cover over its space on the…
Publications
We monitor hundreds of publications, blogs, newsletters, and news sources in Literature, including:
Open Culture
Find our daily culture posts on http://openculture.com, Mastodon, Bluesky and Post. Not here.
Literary Hub
A daily literary website highlighting the best in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and criticism.
Aeon+Psyche
Aeon is a magazine of ideas and culture. Psyche is our sister magazine focused on the human condition. Visit http://aeon.co and http://psyche.co for more.
High Country News
An independent magazine dedicated to shining a light on all the complexities of the Western U.S. Know the West. #nonprofit
The Pudding
The Pudding is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. Email: sup@pudding.cool Support: http://patreon.com/thepudding
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful. We favor timeless pieces—links with long shelf-lives, articles that are still relevant one month, one year, or even ten years from now. These lists of the best resources on any topic are the result of years of careful curation.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Which sources does Refind monitor on literature?
We monitor hundreds of sources on literature, including Open Culture, Literary Hub, Aeon+Psyche, High Country News, The Pudding, and many more.
Can I submit a link?
Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).
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