Lit Hub Daily: August 14, 2019

• “I grew up in a faith of light. We didn’t like to talk about the darkness.” Lyz Lenz on seeking darkness, finding new creation myths, and hitting the road. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “I’m here! I’m here to become a bride of Christ!” Sister Helen Prejean on leaving home, and life before Dead Man Walking. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Elizabeth Holmes was far from the first scientific fraud: on the tragicomic farce of faking it in the lab. | Lit Hub Science
• In the era of prepackaging, India’s community cookbooks are having a quiet renaissance. | Lit Hub Food
• “Texas is oil money, horses, pollution, boarding schools, prisons, tech companies, and jaw-dropping poverty.” Six books you should read about the Lone Star State. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Maggie Paxson on the French village that saved hundreds fleeing Nazi persecution. | Lit Hub History
• “Paradoxical, ambiguous, classical, modern.” Roy Jacobsen on the sagas of Iceland, some of Europe’s most enduring, complex literary works. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Howard Michael Gould guides through the most criminally underappreciated cult classics of 1970s cinema. | CrimeReads
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Erica Wagner on anti-nostalgia memoirs and Walt Whitman at 200. | Book Marks
• “Every year, I get goosebumps.” A high school English teacher on sharing Toni Morrison’s Beloved with his students. | The Atlantic
• On the under-read Deborah Vogel, muse of Bruno Schulz and “wandering star of Yiddish Lit.” | Tablet
• Why hikers on the Appalachian Trail love fantasy novels—how they might make the hikes a little easier. | Outside
• “It isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book.” How The Grapes of Wrath came to be. | The Guardian
• How did Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson influence the state of contemporary poetry and literary activism? | The Virginian Pilot
• Sci-fi just might be the genre to help us understand the wacky French underground music of the 1970s, or “French Krautrock.” | Quietus
• Are you a team player who likes books, sunshine, and light blogging? Apply to be the next “Barefoot Bookseller” at a luxury resort in the Maldives! | Metro UK

Also on Lit Hub: On Reading Women, Madhuri Vijay on the outsider’s perspective of the Kashmir conflict • Juliet Escoria talks to Brad Listi about non-redemptive memoir on Otherppl • The sagas of Iceland are the backbone of Nordic literature • Booksellers recommend their favorite books in translation • Read a story by Jim Fairhall from the Spring 2019 issue of Consequence.