Lit Hub Daily: April 17, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 2014, Gabriel Garcia Marquez dies.
- “Is Canada a viable country?” Yes, at least according to the American literary canon (and 40 million Canadians). | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Am I the literary asshole if I think basically all writers are assholes?” Probably. | Lit Hub
- Vinh Nguyen on memory, floating signifiers, and the challenge of capturing a country as multifarious as Vietnam in a memoir. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “This is the chief way in which my process seems to differ from other writers, and most cleaves to the theatre: these elements do not appear until late in the game.” How directing plays taught Nicole Galland to write novels. | Lit Hub Craft
- “This is the world that Gatsby warns of: one with no solidarity, just avarice and pleasure-seeking.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- David Narrett explores how the Cherokee nation used diplomacy as a strategy for of self-preservation. | Lit Hub History
- “It’s hard to explain ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ Nobody had created a pop song like this before.” How camaraderie and rivalry between John Lennon and Paul McCartney produced a classic hit. | Lit Hub Music
- What’s Ariana Reines reading? Books by Orlando Reade, Ishmael Reed, Georges Bataille, and more. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Kian Rahimi was fifteen years old when he learned how one moment can change a person’s life forever.” Read from Sara Jafari’s novel, Things Left Unsaid. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “As one destroys, may another create and rebuild.” Elon Green will not be changing his name. | The New York Times
- Samuel G. Freedman wonders if David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross has always offered less a “ruthless critique of capitalism” than “a joyful ethnography of Donald Trump’s America.” | The New Republic
- “It’s saying one thing to the federal government and saying another thing to faculty and students.” Meghnad Bose and Sacha Biazzo investigate the whiplash Columbia’s forced upon its Middle Eastern Studies department. | The Intercept
- Chelsea Kirk on how a spreadsheet became a record of abuses by Los Angeles landlords. | n+1
- Luke Messac explains how three recent books demonstrate why Americans mistrust our healthcare system. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “And perhaps it is this capacity for displacement and condensation, this unbounded potential for granting the imaginary a corporeal shape, that renders literature so akin to the space of a dream.” Alex Tan on On Mansoura Ez Eldin’s The Orchards of Basra. | Words Without Borders
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