Lit Hub Daily October 18, 2021
TODAY: In 1851, Moby-Dick is first published in England as The Whale (read more about it here).
In our new series, Teaching Through a Pandemic, Molly Castner considers how “truth” became a controversial subject in classrooms, and Rashaan Alexis Meneses confronts a season of illness and fire. | Lit Hub Teaching
“It is no accident that climate denialism is strongest in the settler-colonial countries of the Anglosphere.” Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Ben Ehrenreich. | Lit Hub Climate Change
Oedipus at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter: Bryan Doerries on trauma, communal theater, and Sophocles. | Lit Hub Theater
“With the local newspaper, I realized I wasn’t writing to be seen or to impress, I was writing as an act of service.” Lessons from Nickolas Butler, novelist-slash-small-town-columnist. | Lit Hub
Read 19th-century reports from the western US about harrowing encounters with “large winged reptiles”… AKA, dragons. | Lit Hub History
Meriel Schindler on the unusual relationship between Hitler and his family physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch, who happened to be Jewish. | Lit Hub History
Sesali Bowen muses on beauty ideals and who gets to be a “bad bitch.” | Lit Hub
“The nature of rising inequality is such that the circle of joy is always shrinking.” Matthew Stewart calculates the cruelty of the American Dream. | Lit Hub Politics
What do journalists owe their subjects—especially unwilling ones? | Lit Hub
The Book of Atlantis Black author Betsy Bonner talks Wuthering Heights, Bluets, and Mary Gaitskill’s sex scenes. | Book Marks
On Keen On, Mary Beard on what we can learn from images of Roman autocrats, and Jean Becker on George H.W. Bush’s life after presidency. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel
“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.” Looking back at John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. | Book Marks “It’s a terrible thing to be estranged from your own language because you don’t feel that you reach a certain standard.” Manon Steffan Ros discusses the spiritual power of translation. | Words Without Borders
John Ganz considers the history of “performative.” | Gawker
Helen Macdonald profiles Denis Villeneuve, the filmmaker breaking “the curse of Dune.” | The New York Times Magazine
Elizabeth Gonzalez James discusses her book’s path to publication, millennial unemployment, and her writing influences. | Split Lip Magazine
Watch a video of Eugene Lim and Jonathan Lethem in conversation, presented by Community Bookstore. | Community Bookstore Live
Chelsea G. Summers reflects on her experience selling books through TikTok and other social media platforms. | Dirt
Lincoln Michel on writerly envy and the trap of the “ladder mindset.” | Countercraft
NEW ON LIT HUB RADIO
Richard Powers discusses the duplicity of bewilderment, on First Draft. * The History of Literature considers the seduction of mysteries. * Lauren Groff talks about exploring the many meanings of “matrix,” on The Literary Life. * Listen to a narrated essay by Catherine Bush about reciprocity, care, and ecological loss, on Emergence Magazine.
ALSO ON LITERARY HUB
EPILEPSY IN LITERATURE
Louise Fein considers how epilepsy has been (poorly) portrayed in popular fiction. |