Lit Hub Daily: April 13, 2023

• Omer Aziz on finding himself trapped between East and West in Jerusalem: “Everywhere I went there had been an implicit question everyone seemed to be asking: What side are you on?” | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Books from the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the most important arts patron you’ve never heard of. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “Is all historical fiction not a branch of speculative fiction, after all?” Sophie Mackintosh considers the past as its own literary genre. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Jeff Boyd on pursuing his dream of a writing career, even when it meant commuting between Chicago and Iowa City. | Lit Hub

• Selene Ross on learning to write better dialogue by making audio erotica: “Nothing quite kills the mood in a sensual audio story like the caricatured whiplash of a poorly rendered spank.” | Lit Hub Craft

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• “It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Edan Lepucki considers Parable of the Sower and Octavia Butler’s radical version of vulnerability. | Los Angeles Times

• Catherine Lacey recommends 10 “badly behaved” biographies. | The Guardian

• Rapid-fire book recs from Congresswoman Katie Porter. | ELLE

• Charles Dickens did a LOT for literature, but did he also come up with the first fictional android? | NewScientist

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• “I had published the story in a half-baked state (in a literary magazine), and regretted it very much.” Haruki Murakami’s first novel in six years, a remix of a very old story, hits shelves in Japan today. | Kyodo News

Also on Lit Hub: Cocktails inspired by Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston • Daphne Kalotay on the value of short fiction • Read a story from Izumi Suzuki’s newly translated collection, Hit Parade of Tears (tr. Daniel Joseph)