Lit Hub Daily: August 24, 2023

• Sexual taboos in post-war America: How From Here to Eternity contradicted the country’s wholesome notions of itself. | Lit Hub Film

• “Whatever has been invented, Le Guin teaches us, can be reinvented.” John Plotz revisits Earthsea. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Moeen Farrokhi on writing and humiliation under Iranian censorship: “I began to question the very act of writing itself.” | Lit Hub Memoir

• Drew Gilpin Faust looks at the radicalization of anti-war student activism during the Vietnam War. | Lit Hub Politics

• “For all of us who lack superpowers, storytelling may be the surest way to grasp the elastic dimensions of life.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Matteo Wong considers AI’s immense carbon footprint. | The Atlantic

• “By slowly peeling back the artifice of this genre—the claim to authority, the rush of discovery, the armchair psychoanalysis—he reveals the hollowness at its center.” Jack Sheehan on true crime and Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence. | The Baffler

• If you loved The Great Gatsby, it’s time to read Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife. | The Conversation

• “The question that hovers over all literary tourism of this kind is: Who is this for?” Namwali Serpell writes about her visit to Princeton’s Toni Morrison exhibition. | NYRB

• Past winners of The New York Times’ student writing contest offer writing advice to fellow teens. | The New York Times

• “Is it possible that, despite his protestations, Flaubert was simply … goofing off sometimes?” David Schurman Wallace on distraction. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: A reading list of comeback stories • New poetry by Taylor Byas • Read from Don Gillmor’s latest novel, Breaking and Entering