Lit Hub Daily: April 19, 2022

TODAY: In 1927, Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity in her play Sex.  

• Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death: On the many (many) ways to die in Shakespeare’s day. | Lit Hub History

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• Emily St. John Mandel talks to Jane Ciabattari about the narrative possibilities of time travel and her new novel, Sea of Tranquility. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• “I’m braver than I was before I wrote this book.” Rebecca Scherm on the daily terrors of writing climate fiction. | Lit Hub Climate Change

• THE ANNOTATED NIGHTSTAND: What Tajja Isen’s reading now and next, from The Lonely Stories to All the Pretty Horses. | Lit Hub

• How do you fictionalize technology when it’s constantly changing? Claire Stanford has some thoughts. | Lit Hub Tech

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• Missing mussels and omelettes for amateurs: An inside look at Judith Jones’ first editorial notes for Julia Child. | Lit Hub Food

• “We were two women, quite different, but similar in our ambition.” Adrienne Celt on grad school and ambition, death and regret. | Lit Hub Memoir

• A veterinarian’s perspective on writing animals. | CrimeReads

• “The trick isn’t convincing students to drop their dogmas. It’s convincing them that the stuff we’re talking about could matter in lives already complicated by many other things.” Lucas Mann on the underreported challenges facing college students and teachers. | Slate

• How food researcher Sonia Tashjian is piecing together the history of Armenia’s cuisine with a handful of rare manuscripts. | Atlas Obscura

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• Florida’s education department rejected math textbooks for addressing “prohibited topics,” including what they claimed was critical race theory. | NPR

• “How we as Americans approach restrictions on literature curriculums is not only flawed but also wholly reactionary.” Sungjoo Yoon, a junior in high school, weighs in on book bans. | The New York Times

• “We are now in this world where things are just moving and you just have to keep running to keep up with it.” Jane Pek on writing and 21st-century technology. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Revisit Kathy Acker’s 1997 profile of the Spice Girls. | The Guardian

• “I love a poem that reveals its own subjectivity, that exalts in it.” Lucia Lotempio on poems and testimony. | Harriet

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Also on Lit Hub: What does it mean to understand pain? • Ben Shattuck follows Henry David Thoreau’s walks • Read from Caren Beilin’s latest novel, Revenge of the Scapegoat

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