Lit Hub Daily: April 29, 2022

TODAY: In 1917, Maya Deren (born Eleonora Derenkowska), Ukrainian-born American filmmaker and writer, is born. (Pictured here in Meshes of the Afternoon.) 

• “Twitter is, by definition, a rotten product designed by tech billionaires to compound our inattention and narcissism.” Why Elon Musk and Twitter deserve each other. | Lit Hub Tech

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• Marian Schwartz considers how Putin’s war will affect the future of Russian literature in translation. | Lit Hub Ukraine

• Negesti Kaudo recommends books that explore what it means to be Black, American, and a woman. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Are we living in a golden age of historical fiction for people of color? | Lit Hub

• Adriana Trigiani recounts how a gemology class at Christie’s helped her inhabit the world of her new novel. | Lit Hub Craft

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• Read Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 address to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, in which he describes writing a little book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. | Lit Hub Craft

• Deep, passionate, co-dependent: Jonathan Howland in praise of men in love who aren’t (in most cases) lovers. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• New titles by Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, Douglas Stuart, and Margo Jefferson feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Month. | Book Marks

• Laura Meckler and Perry Stein look at a handful of books that are frequently challenged in schools—and why. | The Washington Post

• A researcher is working to locate books made with toxic materials, including arsenic, now housed in libraries and rare book collections. | National Geographic

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• “Once I started asking other people about their daydreams, I began to realize that daydreams are like pain: impossible to compare across the bodies of dreamers.” Leslie Jamison on daydreaming. | Astra Magazine

• Judith Levine reports from a celebration of Amazon’s unionization on Staten Island. | n+1

• Don Winslow on the complicated ethics of depicting violence in fiction. | TIME

• “If you poke at the logic of the book for even a second, it completely falls apart.” Revisiting Frank Peretti’s Christian fantasy novels, which fueled decades of conservative hysteria. | Vox

Also on Lit Hub: Lillie Lainoff on chronic illness in literature • A poem by Monika Herceg (tr. Marina Veverec) • Read from Steve Almond’s latest novel, All the Secrets of the World

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