Lit Hub Daily: August 21, 2023

TODAY: In 2006, Yizhar Smilansky, noted Israeli writer known as S. Yizhar, dies at 89.    

• “A fruit that unites the world.” Emily Monosson traces the history, evolution, and biological enemies of bananas. | Lit Hub Food

• How Ralph Ellison brought American literary culture to Europe during the Cold War. | Lit Hub History

• David Shih on missing his father’s death: “The answer has something to do with how one of these men learned what it means to be Chinese, and a son and a citizen besides.” | Lit Hub Memoir

• Claire Stanford reflects on (finally) writing a biracial protagonist. | Lit Hub

• Rare books and documents and other priceless artifacts of Native Hawaiian history were lost when the Na’Aikane o Maui Cultural and Research Center burned down in the Maui fires. | All Things Considered

• “The Boy, who arrives to tell them that Godot ‘won’t come this evening,’ might just as well as have been François Mitterrand.” On Susan Sontag’s production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, 30 years on. | Times Literary Supplement

• Cal Newport makes the case against a “new Twitter.” | The New Yorker

• “This kind of power concentrated in a democracy is not acceptable.” Authors and booksellers are urging the Justice Department to investigate Amazon. | The New York Times

• Michael Lewis’s Moneyball was published 20 years ago, and, Benjamin Charles Germain Lee argues, it made sports worse. | Jacobin

Also on Lit Hub: Jenn Shapland on her new, boundary-dissolving collection • New poetry by Mariana Spada (tr. Robin Myers) • Read a story from the new issue of The Gettysburg Review

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