Lit Hub Daily: April 21, 2022

TODAY: In 1930, Brazilian poet, playwright, and novelist Hilda Hilst is born. 

• Protest, lament, and call to hope: Edward Hirsch traces the roots of the American poetry tradition. | Lit Hub Poetry

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• “This battle will have to be waged by every single one of us. The blaze is at our door.” Arundhati Roy on the battle between myth and history. | Lit Hub

• Anne Lazurko reflects on “imprinting imagination on the real” to fictionalize the long-suppressed histories of Holland and Indonesia. | Lit Hub History

• Lucasta Miller considers Jane Campion’s exquisite biopic of John Keats, which captures his relationship with the love of his life. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• “There has never been a civilization healthier than Whitman’s Amer­ica.” On the legacies of Walt Whitman and his fellow transcendentalists. | Lit Hub History

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• Taylor Brown on the aviators who inspired William Faulkner, starting with the “Balloonitic” who crashed at the family home. | Lit Hub History

• Audrey Schulman on Carl Linnaeus’s many names and the limits of scientific terminology. | Lit Hub Science

• Kirk Walsh talks to the Iranian translators of her novel about the translation process and the book’s resonance in Iran. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• Jennifer Wilson on Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, Jennifer Krasinski on Gary Indiana’s Fire Season, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Curtis Evans on the charming murder mysteries of Edith Howie. | CrimeReads

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• “It opens with a warning to readers not to believe an ailment can be caused by witchcraft, the evil eye, or cured by magic.” Aminatta Forna on the lifesaving book, Where There Is No Doctor. | Orion

• Lincoln Michel breaks down the infamous “show, don’t tell.” | Counter Craft

• Where “tea” becomes “the bitter brown infusion.” Behind the Second Mentions Twitter account, which documents attempts at elegant variations of the same word. | The New Yorker

• “American entertainment culture had a very pacifying effect on Germany.” Harald Jähner discusses his book Aftermath, and the struggle to forgive his parents’ generation. | The Guardian

• Meg Woolhouse reports on how public libraries in the Boston area came to unknowingly lend ebooks “that promote white supremacy and neo-Nazi philosophy.” | WGBH

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• The organization We Need Diverse Books is giving grants to educators who want to teach and offer diverse texts that are being challenged by groups around the country. | Publishers Weekly

• Jonathan Aprea looks at Adventures in Poetry, a publication from 1968 to 1975 that “provides a valuable access point into a vibrant and social community of writers who overlapped both in life and on the page.” | JSTOR Daily

Also on Lit Hub: The pleasure of British historical reality TV shows • A poem by Harmony Holiday from her new collection, Maafa • Read from Roy Jacobsen’s newly translated novel, Eyes of the Rigel (tr. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw)

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