Lit Hub Daily: August 2, 2022

TODAY: In 1869, George Eliot starts writing Middlemarch. 

• “It seemed like having a kid was the only adventure I hadn’t undertaken.” Michelle Tea on embracing (unconventional) motherhood. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Are contemporary novels that don’t acknowledge the pandemic just alt-history? Clare Pollard has thoughts. | Lit Hub Criticism

• “For every pet that’s died, the one thing they’ve had in common has been my feeling of not knowing what to do with my grief—I could do everything, anything, nothing.” E.B. Bartels on disenfranchised grief. | Lit Hub

• Bill Glose on drawing from his own life to write stories of war. | Lit Hub

• Daisy Hildyard considers the long tradition of humans swallowing bugs in fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• The month in literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of July. | Book Marks

• Fashion editors turned thriller writers Amina Akhtar and Erin Mayer talk fashion, murder, and rage. | CrimeReads

• The antitrust trial that will decide whether Penguin Random House can acquire Simon & Schuster begins this week: here’s a rundown of why it’s important. | The New York Times

• Kali Fajardo-Anstine on honoring the past: “All of my writing is guided by the need to feel culturally seen and acknowledged as a vital part of the American identity.” | The Rumpus

• Random House Art Director Robert Scudellari—who designed books for Toni Morrison, John Cheever, and Robert Caro—has died at 88. | Publishers Weekly

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• Hilary A. Hallett on the work of Elinor Glyn, whose sex novel “helped crack the genteel code in Anglo-American fiction years before D.H. Lawrence’s more celebrated problems with the censors.” | Slate

• John Kelly on the art of choosing a good vacation read. | The Washington Post

• From Kim Kelly to Jon Melrod, labor journalists and organizers have released a number of new books this year. | Labor Notes

• “Our impulse to sort one another into like-me and not-like-me comes at the worst possible moment in time.” Mohsin Hamid on the perils of an increasingly polarized world. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: A conversation with Marianne Wiggins • What’s the point of a jellyfish? • Read from Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, The Last White Man

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