Lit Hub Daily October 14, 2021
TODAY: In 1888, Katherine Mansfield is born.
A taxonomy of famous writers’ houses, from Lord Byron’s abbey to Hanya Yanagihara’s Soho loft. | Lit Hub
How will humans measure time if biotechnology helps us live forever? Jeanette Winterson looks at the bigger picture of AI. | Lit Hub Tech
“In this one, she never knows hunger or pure, crystalline fear. In this one, she does.” In which Lucas Mann considers our tiny, spectacular futures (written a week after a very damning IPCC climate report). | Lit Hub Climate Change
Steph Cha wonders how mystery writers might respond to the tragedy, injustice, and crime on display in 2020. | Lit Hub
“I know now that these things cast a very long shadow over my life.” Carole Angier considers how history shaped W.G. Sebald’s work. | Lit Hub Biography
Katie Ives on the women who launched Summit, the first monthly climbing magazine in the US, when mountaineering was a “man’s world.” | Lit Hub Sports
Todd Doughty recommends books that spark joy. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
In praise of couscous: Christine Sahadi Whelan shares the recipe for a weeknight favorite. | Lit Hub Food
“My father even slept to Fox News, his nighttime ears serenaded by fearmongering about Archie Bunker’s lost American dream.” Phillip Hurst searches for inner peace in the wake of his father’s ideology. | Lit Hub Memoir
Christian Lorentzen on Richard Powers’s Bewilderment, Tony Tulathimutte on Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
James McGrath Morris on Tony Hillerman and the origins of his iconic second fiddle, Jim Chee. | CrimeReads
WATCH: Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi and Eileen Myles on writing against linearity • Robbie Bach on venture terrorism • Max Chafkin on the dangerous intersection of tech and politics • Fiona Hill on the increasingly Russian way of life in America. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel Read a new short story by Chen Qiufan, translated by Emily Jin. | Noema
Victoria Chang discusses her book, the strange nature of memory, and silence as inheritance. | NPR
“Everyone is somebody’s agent, his novels seem to be saying; everyone is the instrument of a power they have no ability to counter or even recognize.” Jake Bittle on John Le Carré’s genius for surveillance. | The New Republic
Jay Caspian Kang explores how the term “Asian American” became “mostly meaningless.” | The Nation
Juan Gabriel Vásquez considers the power of fiction “to liberate us from our frustratingly limited perspectives on life.” | Words Without Borders
Rebecca Solnit talks about reading George Orwell in an era of climate crisis. | Los Angeles Review of Books
Gary Budden breaks down the books that engage with urban legends. | The Guardian
NEW ON LIT HUB RADIO
Susan Orlean discusses the animal kingdom and the goal of writing, on The Maris Review. * José Vadi breaks down race and class politics in the 1993 action film The Fugitive, on Open Form. * Chris Hedges talks to Lena Herzog about the pandemic’s ultimatum, on The Quarantine Tapes. * Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda on the alchemy of making music and art, on Change Lab. * Georgina Pazcoguin talks patriarchy in the ballet, on Book Dreams. * We Have Ways of Making You Talk digs into the controversies surrounding WWII military leader George S. Patton.
ALSO ON LITERARY HUB
“MORE THAN A FEARFUL REFUSAL TO PARTICIPATE”
On the complexities of the 1763 Berbice slave rebellion. HOW OPERA INVENTED THE MODERN FAN
Alison Kinney on the barriers to appreciating art the “right” way. |