Lit Hub Daily: August 26, 2019

TODAY: In 1901, Australian author and poet Eleanor Dark, pictured here with The Storm of Time manuscript, is born.

• Everything is fleeting (including your youth) so we’re celebrating the end of summer with this list of the 50 greatest coming-of-age stories of all time. | Lit Hub
• “Do you really want the people who brought you social media to program our future machine overlords?” Bryan Walsh on the terrifying possibilities of AI superintelligence. | Lit Hub
• In case you needed another reason to love Kurt Vonnegut: he really, really hated guns. | Lit Hub
• When the only explanation for a powerful woman is dark magic: Sady Doyle considers the man who insisted his wife was a malevolent fairy. | Lit Hub
• “The genius within the system.” How Martin Scorsese straddled Hollywood and auteur filmmaking. | Lit Hub
• “There were ways of being free or at least acting as if you were free, ways of blending with no wallpaper.” Vera Wasowski, larger than life in postwar Warsaw. | Lit Hub
• This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians: Annie Spence talks Nora Ephron, Patrick Swayze, and getting it on in the stacks. | Book Marks
• To celebrate #WiT month, here’s a quartet of wondrous works by women in translation. | Book Marks
• J. L. Doucette had just finished her first mystery novel when a startling discovery changed her perspective on writing about violence. | CrimeReads
• Despite an authoritarian government and the “countless petty tyrannies of patriarchy,” Uganda’s literary scene is flourishing. | The Economist
• Maybe we can finally put the “audiobooks vs. physical books” argument to rest? It turns out, your brain can’t tell the difference between listening to a book and reading one. | Discover
• “There’s something to be said for not burning out like a fabulous roman candle and, instead, for patiently, diligently keeping the flame lit.” On the radical talent of 100-year-old poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. | The Baffler
• Richard Booth, who turned Hay-on-Wye into the used book capital of the world, has died at the age of 80. | BBC
• On “the great book scare,” during which some would-be readers thought library books might carry and spread disease. (Probably not the root of America’s anti-intellectualism problem, though). | Smithsonian
• Katherine Kressman Taylor’s Address Unknown, a short 1938 book in epistolary form, was once credited with warning Americans about the horrors of Nazi Germany. | The Guardian
• Read a new poem, “Shelter,” by Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. | Boston Review
• Magdalena Edwards’ account of a harrowing experience working on a translation of Clarice Lispector with Benjamin Moser raises questions about—among other things—the nature of editor-translator relationships. | LARB, Women in Translation

Also on Lit Hub: On But That’s Another Story, Will Schwalbe talks to Pamela Paul about her long path to becoming a writer and editor • On writing the impossible grief of young widowhood • Read a poem by Jane Mead from the collection To the Wren • “China Illustrata,” story by Paolo di Paolo from The Florentine Literary Review (trans. Jamie Richards).

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