Lit Hub Daily: April 12, 2021

• Ottessa Moshfegh has a witchy new book slated for next summer, set in a vanished medieval fiefdom. | The Hub

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• “African American literature, as a discipline, was never a promise.” Shanna Greene Benjamin pays tribute to Nellie Y. McKay, one of the scholars who fulfilled that promise. | Lit Hub Biography

• From overinflated to opaque: Jason Guriel considers the author bio, those minor texts with major ambitions. | Lit Hub

• “My parents must have always hoped that business would keep the family together, but the stakes of succession cost too much.” Melissa Scholes Young on growing up in the family pest control business and three generations of American Dreaming. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Cut off from his home country of Italy during the pandemic, Andrea Bajani takes his family on a road trip to Italy, Texas. | Lit Hub

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• Natalie Baszile honors the long—and unsung—history of Black and brown farmers and land stewards. | Lit Hub History

• “While the comedic imitation mode for performing blackness is often rewarded financially, the exhibition/trauma mode for performing blackness is often rewarded by the film industry itself.” Ayanna Thompson considers racial tropes and the white gaze. | Lit Hub Film and TV

• Harlem Shuffle, Their Eyes Were Watching God, George and Martha, and more rapid-fire book recs from Emma Straub. | Book Marks

• Your Week in Virtual Book Events. | Lit Hub

• Are Republicans so obsessed with raging against the “cancellation” of Dr. Seuss that they’re distracted from doing real harm? (And if so, should we loudly “cancel” more old children’s books?) | The New Republic

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• “What does social engineering do to our inner lives? It restricts our imagination—and, therefore, our freedom.” Sanjena Sathian explores how the “model minority” myth harms everyone. | Time

• How a collector and a curator are trying to trace historic Hebrew typefaces to their creators. | Atlas Obscura 

• “I think, looking back, I wanted to act because I did not know myself at all.” Kaitlyn Greenidge considers how acting fueled a journey of self-discovery. |  BuzzFeed News

• Dorris Lessing’s writing in On Cats puts “the boundary between wildness and domesticity” front and center. | Guernica

• Olivia Giovetti breaks down the operatic moments—and what they show us—in the movie Promising Young Woman. | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Also on Lit Hub: How Björk helped Iceland weather the global financial crisis • A poem by Ellen Hagan • Read a story from J. Robert Lennon’s new collection, Let Me Think