Lit Hub Daily: April 19, 2021

TODAY: In 1832, José Echegaray, Spanish playwright and Nobel Laureate, is born.  

• How a 33-year-old Catholic priest with an astronomy degree convinced Einstein that the universe is always expanding. | Lit Hub Science

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• Your week in virtual book events, featuring Camille Dungy, Gina Frangello, and the second annual National Antiracist Book Festival. | Lit Hub

• INTERVIEW WITH A JOURNAL: Everything you need to know about The Kenyon Review. | Lit Hub

• Why does walking help us think? Jeremy DeSilva looks to great writers, from Charles Darwin to Toni Morrison, for answers. | Lit Hub

• “The internet turned Florida Man into a Southern Gothic figure of indulgence, decadence, and bad decision making.” Tyler Gillespie traces the rise and fall of an infamous (and harmful) meme. | Lit Hub

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• KT Sparks recommends literary characters who make graceless exits, from Jane Austen’s rejected Mr. Collins to Winnie-the-Pooh. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “Love Ukraine as you would the sun”: Kate Tsurkan spotlights Ukrainian authors in translation. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• The man who cried gold: How Lying George Carmack set off the Klondike Gold Rush—once everyone actually believed him. | Lit Hub History

• From climate change to car-crash sex: a look back at five classic J. G. Ballard novels. | Book Marks

• Behemoths of destruction: Judith Nies on the capitalist interests of engineering billionaire Stephen D. Bechtel Jr., Republican politics, and the story of Black Mesa. | Arrowsmith Journal

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• “This is the gift that Wesley Brown gives to his readers: a new way to speak, a language that we have to excavate and rescue from murky depths.” Rereading Wesley Brown’s Tragic Magic. | The New Yorker

• The country has mourned more than half a million COVID casualties largely in private. Zoé Samudzi wonders if “an unobstructed engagement with death [would] make these deaths less unfathomable.”  | Ssense

• Why are Soviet-era children’s books in such high demand in India these days? | Atlas Obscura

• Herman Melville: culinary inspiration? Valerie Stivers considers the writer’s legacy and replicates the chowder dishes in Moby-Dick. | The Paris Review

• “People have asked me, ‘What’s it like, being the first intersex poet?’ … I’m just the first one you know exists.” Matt Mitchell addresses writing, gender, and intersex identity in a conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib. | Hooligan Mag

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• As an art collector, Roxane Gay “prioritize[s] work by Black artists, and then women artists and queer artists and artists of color.” | Artnet

Also on Lit Hub: Ada Limón on preparing the body for a reopened world • Shane McCrae’s poem, “The Professor” • Read from Voices of the Lost (translated by Marilyn Booth)

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