Lit Hub Daily: April 27, 2022

• Julia Child’s editor Judith Jones was the “visionary behind what is widely considered the canon of English language cookbooks”—so why does HBO’s Julia get her all wrong? | Lit Hub Film & TV

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• A.J. Jacobs traces the human affinity for wordplay, from anagrams as divine messages to the New York Times Spelling Bee. | Lit Hub

• “People like her never die, they live on.” Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah on the liberating experience of reading bell hooks. | Lit Hub Criticism

• “What is the use of small change?” Read the last poems of Les Murray. | Lit Hub

• Steph Jagger recounts a mother-daughter trip to “the most potent of portals” in the wake of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Sara Baume on realizing she stole the title of her new novel… and finding unexpected kinship in the original. | Lit Hub

• When the disabled miners of the West Virginia Black Lung Association fought for justice—and won. | Lit Hub History

• The month in literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of April. | Book Marks

• Alma Katsu on why she finally decided to write a character who shares her ethnicity. | CrimeReads

• “We’ve all been touched by capitalism in some way, and most of us have been beaten bloody by it.” Kim Kelly on writing about labor and justice. | Esquire

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• “Some manuscripts survive the collapse of civilization, others do not; it seems unlikely that these survivals and disappearances precisely track merit.” B.D. McClay considers the lifespan of scholarship. | Gawker

• A reading list of work by Arab American writers, in honor of Arab American Heritage Month. | CLMP

• “The coziness of the bus, its quiet engine, and outside a gray muffler of a sky, our motion—slow—made me think, Please, hope, don’t stop! Don’t come to an end!” A dispatch from Fanny Howe’s 1994 journey around the UK. | Bookforum

• Bela Shayevich tells the story of her family’s resettlement, and becoming an American Jew—“to my parents’ disgust and dismay.” | Jewish Currents

• Read a new story from Ren Arcamone. | HEAT

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• “For choosing her vocation over her motherhood, she has been both vilified and celebrated.” Julie Phillips on the life of Doris Lessing. | Slate

Also on Lit Hub: Why Danica Roem decided to run for office • Six poems by Victoria Chang • Read from Jacqueline Harpman’s newly translated novel, I Who Have Never Known Men (tr. Ros Schwartz)