Lit Hub Daily: April 24, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1731, Robinson Crusoe author Daniel DeFoe dies.
- “The questions…open a remarkable window into the private lives of men and women in an era long before our own.” Mary Beth Norton takes a deep dive into the history of the advice column. | Lit Hub History
- Steven W. Thrasher remembers Joseph Sonnabend, one of the world’s first AIDS doctors. | Lit Hub Biography
- Lena Moses-Schmitt and Martha Park share an illustrated conversation. | Lit Hub Craft
- Maris Kreizman reminds us that good spaces still exist in the world (and most of those spaces are independent bookstores). | Lit Hub Bookstores
- “Why do we need to see writers (or anyone) at their most open and despairing to be convinced that they are also human?” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Stephen S. Hall explores the centuries-long evolution of the rattlesnake into an American symbol. | Lit Hub History
- Matthew Specktor remembers his mother’s fight to find her place in LA: “All of this suggests not a person who’s simply afraid to be late, but rather one who is running: who remains, always, in flight.” | Lit Hub Memoir
- “Dear God, I am very sorry about the prayer I said in school, it was heresy and I was rightly beaten.” Read from Jo Harkin’s new novel, The Pretender. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “In a time like this when we know it’s going to get worse, the main thing to focus on is maintaining your integrity.” David Velasco talks to Sarah Schulman about writing and solidarity. | Bookforum
- Martin Dolan considers Andrew Lipstein’s fiction and the cycle of literary masculinity discourse. | The Point
- Emma Cole looks back on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Craft, and other icons of 90s goth cinema. | Reactor
- “Places like Iowa City often have scandalous reputations, particularly when embedded in red states. Yet that reputation sometimes stems not from bacchanalian excess, but rather from a refusal to accept the status quo.” Harry Stecopoulos on the poetry of Iowa City. | Public Books
- Scholar and translator Donald Rayfield details his personal, cultural, and political reasons for turning down a lifetime achievement award from Georgia’s Writers’ House. | Words Without Borders
- “Onto this eclectic stage enters the United States with its reawakened expansionist fantasies.” Ieva Jusionyte on contemporary and historical relevance of Greg Grandin’s America, América: A New History of the New World. | Los Angeles Review of Books
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