Lit Hub Daily: April 9, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1821, Charles Baudelaire is born.
- Rebecca Solnit on Mary Shelley’s dystopian sci-fi novel, The Last Man: “As a man, she would have cut a swathe through nineteenth-century English intellectual life and paid no price for living with her future spouse before marriage. As a woman she was cut down to nothing again and again.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- “By the end of October, it was estimated that 6,000 bombs per week had been dropped on Gaza.” Philip Metres delivers dispatches from the land of erasure during a genocide. | Lit Hub Politics
- The Beatles, Natasha Trethewey, the secret lives of librarians, and more. These 24 new books are out today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “Despair. Depression. Death. Joy.” Caoilinn Hughes, Victoria Chang, Elissa Strauss and more authors answer Teddy Wayne’s questions. | Lit Hub In Conversation
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Jane Hirshfield on how the transformative art of translation “opens the psyche’s innermost rooms to the unknown.” | Lit Hub On Translation
Article continues after advertisement - In 1933, 24-year-old Ian Fleming went to Moscow to cover a “show” trial. He later told his editor that From Russia, with Love was informed by what he saw. | Lit Hub Biography
- “I’ll always celebrate tall, strong women in my novels—partly as a love letter to myself, and partly as one to readers.” Katarina Carrasco on female physicality in fiction. | Lit Hub Craft
- Clare Beams considers what the shadowy history of women’s health tells us about its uncertain future. | Lit Hub History
- “She was already underwater when the sun came up. Twenty-five meters down, the first light hit the rose garden in patches, like a hand-colored photograph.” Read from Nell Freudenberger’s new novel, The Limits. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “As we’ve reached the year in which Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower begins, it’s become something of a cliché to comment on how prophetic the novel truly is.” On Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the power of pleasure. | Reactor
- Steven Brower interviews Tim Lane: “Illustration was just a way to make a living while I was working on comics. It actually started with an interest in literature.” | The Comics Journal
- Monika Dziamka talks to Ada Limón about poetry, national parks, and time and place. | Chicago Review of Books
- It’s official! Surprising no one, the most challenged books of 2023 were titles that focused on queer issues or explored themes of race. | The New York Times
- “I like it when I pick up something, I don’t know what it is, and then my head gets blown off. That’s my favorite reading experience.” Maggie Nelson talks to Lauren Michele Jackson. | The New Yorker
- Ed Simon explores the evolution of commonplace books into anthologies, and the act of assembling a literary bouquet. | JSTOR Daily
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