Lit Hub Daily May 6, 2021
TODAY: In 1940, John Steinbeck is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath.
In the latest installment of The Longest Year: 2020+, Brandon Taylor considers how Thomas Dworzak captured our idle moments, unperformed expressions, and strange tensions on Zoom. | Lit Hub Photography
“Until recently, I had no idea that my life was in desperate need of a Swedish artist born in 1862.” Why Patrick Allington can’t stop thinking about Hilma af Klint. | Lit Hub Art
Jer Thorp breaks down the messy and often confusing realm of so-called “public data.” | Lit Hub Tech
“Baldwin wanted us to confront the loveless character of our lives, the prison of our myths, and the illusion of what we take to be ‘safety.’” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. rereads Nothing Personal. | Lit Hub Criticism
Laura Dave on process, writerly affirmations, and Bruce Springsteen as inspiration. | Lit Hub Questionnaires
In search of a living pterodactyl: T. S. Mart and Mel Cabre trace the controversial history of flying cryptids. | Lit Hub Science (?)
Sophie Cousins calls for mountaineering literature “beyond the image of a colonial, stereotypical white male climbing in far-flung ‘exotic’ places.” | Lit Hub
Parul Sehgal on Sarah Schulman’s history of ACT Up New York, Sam Byers on Rachel Cusk’s exquisite cruelty, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
L.R. Dorn on Chester Gillette, Theodore Dreiser, and the origins of literary America’s true crime obsession. | CrimeReads
“In the country of grief, none of us speaks the same language.” Carol Smith on finding a lexicon beyond words after unimaginable loss. | Lit Hub Memoir “The Eleventh Hour, I Spy, Where’s Waldo?, Magic Eye... I wanted all books to make me feel the way these did when my whole body and brain lurched with the click of visual recognition.” Elissa Washuta on world-opening possibilities of picture books. | The Paris Review
Jason Reynolds, Marc Brown, and Mo Willems show off their literary treasures on Antiques Roadshow. | Publishers Weekly
“It’s as if the disparate parts of her life—the public-policy part, the nerdy, abstruse-topic part and the popular-culture-consuming part—are finally coalescing.” Read a profile of Stacey Abrams. | The New York Times
This is how Death, Sex & Money podcast host and author Anna Sale mastered the art of interviewing. | Bitch Media
Lilly Dancyger discusses her just-released mixed-media memoir and why it took over a decade to complete. | Ploughshares
How Jhumpa Lahiri turned toward Italian, began translating her own work, and embraced translation’s “radical state of change.” | BuzzFeed
“Your body knows when you spend too much time trying to see into a space where you physically cannot go.” Marie Mutsuki Mockett recounts her mother’s last days. | The Cut
NEW ON LIT HUB RADIO
How Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople subverts both the orphan trope and the buddy comedy: Nadia Owusu guests on Open Form. * Maggie Shipstead in praise of books that aren’t totally satisfying, * Michael Kleber-Diggs and Kao Kalia Yang discuss how Minnesota’s literary community is reacting to racial injustice, on Fiction/Non/Fiction. * Tim Wu discusses the corporate dangers of a return to fascism, * Gina Nutt on the creative usefulness of feeling stuck, on Otherppl. * Celia C. Peréz talks about creating the zines she couldn’t find in the 90s, on NewberyTart. * “I go through the valley of the shadow of death. I don’t camp there.” * Seth Goldenberg on using radical curiosity to investigate the human condition, on Keen On. * A former “Bletchley Girl,” the women codebreakers who helped win WWII, recounts her experiences on We Have Ways of Making You Talk. * Durs Grünbein describes the hollowness of performing poetry on Zoom,
ALSO ON LITERARY HUB
ON TRYING TO PUNCH LIKE ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Alison Dean explores what it means to write and fight to feel alive. HOW US NEWSPAPERS BECAME UBIQUITOUS
Ken Ellingwood on the social and political function of print media. |