Lit Hub Daily May 20, 2021
TODAY: In 1799, Honoré de Balzac is born.
How does a book get adapted for TV and film? Laura Van Den Berg, Daniel Torday, and Melissa Scholes Young chime in on the process. | Lit Hub
David Weill on the surprise of discovering, after a decade of performing lung transplants, that he’d also become a writer. | Lit Hub Memoir
Mike Bond recommends 11 books for understanding the turbulent, anti-war, LSD-loving 60s. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
A revolutionary reading list from PEN America’s World Voices Festival, featuring Assata Shakur, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and more. | Lit Hub
Mystic inklings or business savvy? How Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, shaped her own destiny. | Lit Hub Biography
Phoebe Wynne considers her first introduction to Antigone—framed as “an insolent, disobedient girl”—and how ancient tales have become a rallying cry for modern women. | Lit Hub Criticism
22 new books by Asian American and Pacific Islander authors perfect for mystery readers. | CrimeReads
Katy Waldman on Olivia Laing’s Everybody, Noah Kulwin on Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
“We imagine nations out of nonexistent lines and reinforce the lines with violence lest they cease to exist altogether.” Suchitra Vijayan on the human casualties of arbitrary borders. | Lit Hub Politics
“Like me, my book will disappear. If I’m lucky, it will shine a little before it disappears.” Claire Cox reflects on virtually launching her debut novel after a year full of loss. | Lit Hub Craft Here are 10 translated books from Haiti to read now. | Words Without Borders
Devoney Looser explores the Austen family’s “complex entanglements” with colonial slavery, from known complicity to anti-slavery activism. | Times Literary Supplement
“What was alternative without bitterness, pasty complexions, hatred of the contemporary, feelings of ostracization, moping?” Jeremy Atherton Lin on Morrissey and the cult of the wounded white male. | The Yale Review
How PERIPLUS collective is demystifying and democratizing the world of writing and publishing for BIPOC writers. | Poets & Writers
A conversation on “guilty pleasures” in academia, from “the iconic texts of bad heterosexuality” to “rich white people fictions.” | LARB
How Lois Lew mastered IBM’s 5,400-character(!) typewriter. | Fast Company
“I feel very blessed to have grown up in a community and in a family where the idea of making art was normal and accepted.” Eve Ewing talks about finding her writing community, the pathways to art, and Black girls in STEM. | Catapult
NEW ON LIT HUB RADIO
R.O. Kwon on the joy of discovering a new kind of Korean childhood * Elizabeth McCracken talks about placing her characters in unexpected settings, on The Maris Review. * Barrett Swanson on his search for reality in a “post-truth” America, on Keen On. * Can we salvage patriotism? Should we? * Laurie Frankel on the way that girls “superhero,” on Book Dreams. * Carolin Benack and Sanjena Sathian discuss the fiction of the economy * Katja Hoyer breaks down Hitler’s campaign for office,
ALSO ON LITERARY HUB
CONTEMPLATING
W.S. MERWIN IN THE WILDS OF NEW JERSEY Nick Ripatrazone on the renowned poet and the wilderness he loved. |