Lit Hub Daily October 8, 2021
TODAY: Harvey Pekar, an underground comic book writer best known for his American Splendor series, is born.
Kelefa Sanneh traces country music’s evolution from twangy regional phenomenon to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” and how it’s remained a genre worth fighting over. | Lit Hub Music
Howard Markel considers why it took scientists so many centuries to grasp genetics. | Lit Hub Science
“There are real men in 2021 who think that women use books as props to ensnare them as if they were falling prey to Marian the Librarian.” Sophie Vershbow on White Lotus, condescension, and Inf*n*te J*st. | Lit Hub
“Queer Love, it turns out, is everything True Love wishes it could be.” Jen Winston on the True Love industrial complex and the rejuvenating power of queerness. | Lit Hub
After the Tree of Life shooting, Mark Oppenheimer asks what Squirrel Hill can teach us about resilience and the power of proximity. | Lit Hub
Larry Lockridge reveals the story behind The Snake Pit, Mary Jane Ward’s dark comic masterpiece. | Lit Hub Criticism
“Literature holds no technical secrets, or at least secrets that can’t be plumbed by a gifted amateur.” Wisława Szymborska recommends learning to write from life. | Lit Hub Craft
INTERVIEW WITH AN INDIE PRESS: Heyday Books editors talk about justice-oriented books and the intersection of publishing and environmental stewardship. | Lit Hub
New titles from Jonathan Franzen, Miriam Toews, Val McDermid, and David Sedaris all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
“[T]he entry fee of being embodied is the certainty...that eventually, something will go wrong with it.” Caitlin Starling intimately dissects the notion of body horror. | CrimeReads
On Keen On, Helen Russell on having a healthy relationship with sadness, and Matthew Pearl on the kidnap and rescue that shaped America. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel 
Welcome to Pillow-Cat Books, “the first animal-focused bookshop in New York.” | The New York Times
Elisabeth Becker describes reading the work of German Jewish intellectuals and finding a “sense of belonging, of being at home in my uncertain and questioning self.” | Tablet
Reconsidering the literary ethics of W. G. Sebald. | The Atlantic
How A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle highlights “the ways in which [John] Coltrane’s understanding of his masterwork had evolved.” | NYRB
Saraciea J. Fennell, founder of the Bronx is Reading, talks about building community through literature. | Remezcla
Lincoln Michel considers the legal and ethical issues at play when a writer fictionalizes real life. | Counter Craft
“So many things pull us away from a mutual project of the left.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the necessity of social transformation. | Public Books
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.
NEW ON LIT HUB RADIO
Journalist Julie Brown on exposing Jeffrey Epstein, on The Literary Life. * Cadwell Turnbull on the social realities behind speculative fiction, * Ricardo Wilson on the importance of interrogating research, on The Common. * Jan Swafford and Robert Levin on Mozart’s infectious genius,
ALSO ON LITERARY HUB
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