Lit Hub Daily October 7, 2021
TODAY: In 1955, Allen Ginsberg, pictured here with Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs, reads from “Howl” for the first time at Six Gallery.
You know it when you see it: the 25 most iconic book covers in history. | Lit Hub
“An institution based on social control instead of social well-being is an institution that needs to be abolished.” Colin Kaepernick on abolition and Black liberation. | Lit Hub Politics
Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the Nobel Prize. | The Hub
“I suspect that I was informed aesthetically and ethically by Sesame Street more than any other thing.” Joshua Ferris takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub
From The Gay Agenda to the Capitol insurrection, Stephanie Grant unpacks the uses and abuses of disgust. | Lit Hub
The marriage experiment: Kimberly Harrington breaks down lifelong partnership into 16 simple (and excruciating) steps. | Lit Hub
Create a charged setting, use direct (not plain) language, and more advice for writing a good fight scene. | Lit Hub Craft
Into the Parisian studio with Enki Bilal, whose epic sci-fi comics “offer a new way of describing dystopia and metamorphosis.” | Lit Hub Comics
Miles Marshall Lewis considers Kendrick Lamar’s 2016 Grammy’s performance, “a prime example of why he wears the mantle of Tupac Shakur.” | Lit Hub Music
How Ralph Waldo Emerson helped transform the word “landscape,” and with it, Americans’ relationship to nature. | Lit Hub Nature
Liana Fink on David Sedaris, Cree LeFavour on Claire Vaye Watkins, Michele Filgate on Miriam Toews, and more of the Reviews You Need To Read This Week. | Book Marks
Georgina Cross recommends ten books in which wealthy families “discover, to their grave disappointment, that money and stature might not be able to buy everything.” | CrimeReads
WATCH: Jen Winston and Adam J. Kurtz talk queer existential dread • Randall Kennedy on the realities of race in America. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel On the connection between baking and the labor of publishing a book. | Catapult
Looking back at a 1950s newsletter dedicated to gay literature, which amassed a mailing list in the thousands despite threats from the FBI. | The New Yorker
Are coffee table books worth it? Design pros weigh in. | The Wall Street Journal
Amitava Kumar in favor of using pictures in books for adults. | The Atlantic
“You have a right to walk out that door. I have an obligation to say what I believe. This is how we get along.” A conversation with Nikki Giovanni. | Public Books
On the “literary Wild West” of Homeric biography. | Lapham’s Quarterly
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson talks about the inspiration behind the stories in My Monticello. | Los Angeles Times
NEW ON LIT HUB RADIO
Téa Obreht talks about Mrs. Danvers, Rebecca’s lesbian feminist hero, on Open Form. * Dave Eggers on Amazon as cataclysm and data’s creep into storytelling, on The Maris Review. * Kaitlyn Greenidge discusses the publishing industry’s shallow relationship with Black literature, on Book Dreams. * José Vadi on mapping a changing California, on Otherppl. * Evan Osnos on collective intervention and moments of social transition, on Just the Right Book. * Elizabeth Wetmore and Kathryn Nuernberger consider SB8, the history of abortion, and Roe v. Wade in danger, on Fiction/Non/Fiction.
BAD WOMEN IS A MUST-LISTEN PODCAST
It’s a cold case like no other. In 1888, five women were brutally murdered in a London slum—attacks so violent the killer earned himself a nickname: Jack the Ripper. But everything you think you know about Jack and those women is wrong.
On the Bad Women podcast, historian Hallie Rubenhold uncovers the real lives of Jack’s victims, revealing discrimination that put them in Jack's path—misogyny women still face today. The show challenges established theories about the murders… causing many supposed Ripper experts to see red.
Listen to Bad Women at https://link.chtbl.com/lithubbadwomen.
ALSO ON LITERARY HUB
THE PRIMORDIAL PULL OF THE TRUFFLE
Rowan Jacobsen on the ever-elusive scent of the captivating mushroom. |