Lit Hub Daily: August 2, 2021

• “I get serious whenever I go in the hood to teach poetry because I know it’s me sitting in those seats.” Ali Black on unlearning craft and writing reliable poems. | Lit Hub Poetry

  Article continues after advertisement

• Surviving this ongoing pandemic “is a project as philosophical as it is political,” writes Benjamin Bratton, so how can Philosophy stop failing us? | Lit Hub

• “My goal this summer is to get as close as I can to the America that Nabokov invented and left in his wake.” Thomas Dai on the author’s cross-country butterfly-hunting trips and his own relationship to American identity. | Lit Hub 

• August’s Astrology Book Club features nuns for Capricorns, horse girls for Libras, and something to keep Leos busy until their friends show up. | Lit Hub

• Chanté Griffin considers what’s asked of Black characters in YA and children’s literature, from The Baby-Sitters Club to The Hate U Give. | Lit Hub Criticism

  Article continues after advertisement

• “The reason I wrote this book is because I had kind of given up on my own eternal struggle.” Jo Hamya discusses autofiction and the process of writing her new novel. | The Rumpus

• Watermelon as radical political art: Exploring the origins of a new online tradition that’s uniting Palestinians worldwide. | Hyperallergic

• Jaime Lowe talks about the incarcerated women who are on the frontlines of firefighting in California. | Shondaland

• Rachel Syme considers the art of the Hollywood memoir. | The New Yorker

• “There would always be another test that Blacks had to meet, a standard that almost invariably found them wanting.” Annette Gordon-Reed on W.E.B. Du Bois’ efforts to showcase Black Americans’ lives on an international stage. | New York Review of Books

  Article continues after advertisement

• Matthew Wills digs into Victorian authors’ preoccupation with ghostly fashion. | JSTOR Daily

• “I was looking for a way to dwell slowly and patiently on life in a way that is philosophical but also intimately tied to the texture of the everyday.” Anuk Arudpragasam on writing his second novel. | Hindustan Times

Also on Lit Hub: Rodrigo Garcia shares memories of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha • Louis Chude-Sokei on the (racist) books that shaped his literary curiosity • Read from Ashley Nelson Levy’s debut novel, Immediate Family