Lit Hub Daily: August 24, 2020

• “Life teaches us again and again that nothing apart from the present moment is within our grasp.” Jhumpa Lahiri, Eduardo Halfon, and Ilan Stavans share views of the pandemic as immigrant writers. | Lit Hub
• On William Faulkner’s Confederate Colonel great-grandfather, and the author’s pride in—and quarrels with—his ancestral legacy. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “Nobody.” A poem by Alice Oswald. | Lit Hub Poetry
• Exploring the gulf between history and national myth in Israel: Haim Bresheeth-Zabner on his father’s refusal to join the Israel Defense Force. | Lit Hub History
• “Despite all its eccentricities and drunken tomfoolery, the writing was always paramount.” Jim Knipfel recalls the upstart NYC alt weekly that delivered us Armond White. | Lit Hub Film
• The hard art of teaching your child where you come from: Nick Flynn returns to the South Shore with his daughter. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “He said to me, in a very plaintive voice, ‘So, is it true?’” Susan Orlean on watching Adaptation with her teenage son. | Slate
• “His point is clear: There can be no in-between. You can’t be passive in this conversation.” ZZ Packer profiles Ibram X. Kendi | GQ
• A profile of Ann Goldstein, the translator as meticulous and self-effacing as her best-known collaborator, Elena Ferrante. | The New York Times
• What will post-pandemic fiction look like? The books that followed 9/11 could be a clue. | Santa Fe New Mexican
• “Melville might not write much about women. But he nails what it feels like to nurse a newborn.” On Moby-Dick and breastfeeding. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• How does Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half respond to Toni Morrison? | Vox
• “Given our inevitable end, it may all ultimately be a tragedy, Perec suggests, but a hell of a lot happens before that.” On the lasting importance of Georges Perec. | 3:AM

Also on Lit Hub: On childcare, self-expectations, and the fragility of American systems • The frustrated migrations of Greece, in mythology and life • Read an excerpt from Judith Schalansky’s Inventory of Losses, trans. by Jackie Smith.