Lit Hub Daily September 24, 2021
TODAY: In 1940, French writer Yves Navarre (left), is born. He's pictured here with journalist Jean Le Bitoux at a march for gay rights in Paris.
“Fitzgerald likes to rub rich people’s monstrousness against their beauty and thereby make sparks fly.” Andrew Martin and Benjamin Nugent discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald on his birthday. | Lit Hub Criticism
Yiyun Li takes ten writing lessons from War and Peace. | Lit Hub Craft
“People just really love reading about kinky sex.” Leigh Cowart on the centuries-long success of sadomasochistic books, from Venus in Furs to Fifty Shades of Grey. | Lit Hub Criticism
Is restoring “wildlife corridors” the key to solving climate change? | Lit Hub
“You’d be reading the script and it would be like, ‘We’ve got to medical the medical until medical happens to medical.’” Behind the scenes of the Grey’s Anatomy writers’ room. | Lit Hub TV
INTERVIEW WITH A JOURNAL: Everything you need to know about The Georgia Review. | Lit Hub
Biographer Jacques Berlinerblau on why it matters that the literary world lacks critical distance when it comes to Philip Roth. | Lit Hub Biography
Which international thriller should you binge this weekend? CrimeReads editor-in-chief Dwyer Murphy has some suggestions. | CrimeReads
Wondering what to read next? Here are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week, both fiction and nonfiction. | Book Marks
WATCH: Kima Jones reads new poetry by James Cagney · Jeanette Winterson on how artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel
Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani look to the past for solutions to handling “a crisis-ridden climatic future.” | Lit Hub Climate Change “I want to know what it is about the truth that prevents me from writing it. Why do I prefer my own version to the ‘real’ version?” Joshua Cohen talks to Lincoln Michel about The Netanyahus and interpreting truth. | Frieze
On the big business of online book clubs and the female founders who are at the helm. | Marie Claire
Alice McDermott discusses making the big leap to nonfiction and the mechanics of craft. | Bomb
“There are many fine writers of literary fiction, maybe too many... but only one world’s richest lady.” Considering the novels of MacKenzie Bezos in the (all-consuming) context of her proximity to Amazon. | The Paris Review
Incarcerated writers reflect on the mental, physical, and emotional toll the pandemic has taken. | The Drift
You’ve seen this book cover: “amorphous daubs of warm, bright color,” “a blocky but refined sans serif.” R.E. Hawley breaks down the trend in book design. | Print
Steve Kettmann pens a love letter to Green Apple Books in San Francisco, where each visit “had a way of both inspiring and exhausting me.” | The Bold Italic
NEW ON LIT HUB RADIO
Celeste Mohammed on writing about the complexities of island life, on The Common. * How can we recapture the ambition and hope of the space-race days? This week on Open Source. * P. Djèlí Clark on imagining an anti-colonial 1900s Cairo,
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ALSO ON LITERARY HUB
CREATING ELVIRA, THE “MISTRESS OF THE DARK”
Cassandra Peterson on how the iconic late-night tv character came to be. |