Lit Hub Daily: April 22, 2021

• Why bury your head in a book? Will Self has some thoughts. | Lit Hub

  Article continues after advertisement

• You, too, can decode Manhattan: Check out this collection of maps and diagrams that chart postwar skyscrapers, the types of people who attend Fashion Week, and more. | Lit Hub

• “Our only crime is to have taken the path that leads to Europe.” Emmanuel Mbolela reflects on the dangerous plight of migrants, including her own exile from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Turns out, 19th-century socialites threw parties that would put Gatsby to shame. | Lit Hub

• “The rules of a world almost dystopian in its peril fell into place, and I felt compelled to write into that setting.” Alena Dillon on the challenges of fictionalizing sexual assault. | Lit Hub Craft

  Article continues after advertisement

• Audrey Clare Farley on the eugenicists who weaponized biology and made forced sterilization a grim reality in the US. | Lit Hub History

• “I didn’t want to be that person who saw something that I could change… and turned away.” Jo Napolitano on the activists who challenged a Pennsylvania school district’s xenophobic enrollment policies. | Lit Hub

• To celebrate Earth Day 2021, Olivia Rutigliano recommends 50 of the best new nonfiction books about the natural world. | Book Marks

• Cate Holohan on hackers, home devices, and technology’s slow creep into domesticity. | CrimeReads

• “[The work] is not something that I’m trying to do as a rebuttal of the white gaze—it’s honestly something I don’t give a shit about.” Camonghne Felix talks to Barry Jenkins about adapting The Underground Railroad. | Vanity Fair

  Article continues after advertisement

• Randy Boyagoda considers autobiographical experience in literature, Godshot, and Via Negativa. | Image Journal

• Mary Norris climbs aboard the “Grammarama ride at Disneyland for Nerds”—AKA the “Taming the Tongue: In the Heyday of English Grammar (1713-1851),” an exhibit on the history of English grammar books. | The New Yorker

• Critic J. R. Ramakrishnan examines how comps aid a translator’s pitch. | Words Without Borders

• “As the closures gathered velocity, I began to pursue her, and I imagined that she was courting me too.” On reading the domestic novels of Magda Szabó during the pandemic. | The Point

• On Giacomo da Lentini—the “engineer of the modern sonnet”—and the poetic possibilities of heresy. | JSTOR Daily

  Article continues after advertisement

• Cynthia Ozick muses on why “we are all in thrall to plot, the unexpected and often exciting turnings of events that call out from every source of life.” | LARB

Also on Lit Hub: Fatima Bhutto on channeling the fearlessness of Malcolm X • Tony Hiss on Pluie the lone wolf and her lessons on landscape • Read from Fiona Mozley’s latest novel, Hot Stew