Lit Hub Daily: April 6, 2021

• Erik Hoel on the joy of growing up in an indie bookstore—and with his badass single mom, who opened The Jabberwocky in 1972 when she was 23 years old. | Lit Hub Memoir

• “You may have noticed that anger is making a comeback for women.” Gina Frangello on rage and infidelity. | Lit Hub

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• “These were women who acted with ferocity and fortitude—even violently.” Judy Batalion on Jewish resistance fighters in Poland, generational trauma, and the haunting question of fight or flight. | Lit Hub History

• Write the first draft for yourself, and other writing advice from Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. | Lit Hub

• Tara Betts on building a Chicago community space, the Whirlwind Learning Center, and why imagining new futures is more necessary than ever. | Lit Hub

• New books you’ll want to bump to the top of your TBR list. | The Hub

• “What can a book do that no other story medium can do? What do books do best?” Steve Hall recommends seven books that begin to answer those questions. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

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• Richard O’Rawe, a former bank robber for the IRA, on writing a heist novel based on a long-unsolved crime. | CrimeReads

• Sabbath’s Theater, Kidnapped, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and more rapid-fire book recs from Phillip Lopate. | Book Marks

• “He had hustle, and he had integrity. He followed his very rigorous tastes and never compromised. It would never occur to him to do so.” Christian Lorentzen remembers Giancarlo DiTrapano, the founder of New York Tyrant and Tyrant Books, who died last week at 47. | Vulture

• “Why would I cut, let alone kill, that which most delights me?” R.O. Kwon makes the case for sparing your darlings. | Catapult

• On reading—and rereading—Marian Engel’s Bear, “a quietly sensual, feminist story that questions its own foundations.” | The New Yorker

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• “I’m interested in the ways in which we can remake the old forms to bear the weight of our own experience.” Michael Prior on his new poetry collection, generational trauma, and the legacy of Japanese internment camps during World War II. | The Rumpus 

• How Empowerment Avenue Writer’s Cohort—an organization that pairs incarcerated writers with journalists and writers on the outside—is helping to bring incarcerated viewpoints to more mainstream publications. | Columbia Journalism Review

• “Bucharest is a floating metropolis for me, a wreckage from the turbulent history of a part of the world that refused to go down for good.” Ioana Morpurgo on Bucharest and its iconic literary landmarks. | Words Without Borders

• Poems by the first Buddhist women “enable us to see things that we have not seen before and to imagine things that we have not dreamed of before.” | Lapham’s Quarterly

Also on Lit Hub: Michio Kaku has some questions about black holes • How Tony Soprano inaugurated a new version of masculinity • Read from Sanjena Sathian’s debut novel, Gold Diggers