Lit Hub Daily: August 27, 2021

• “By the time I was born, the city had been conquered thrice, by the British, the Japanese, and the military junta. Three enemies to symbolize the three torments of the mind.” Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint on war, reincarnation, and the changing names of Myanmar. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Jeffrey Webb revisits the battle for Blair Mountain, “a reminder that those of us in coal country do not always vote against our own interests.” | Lit Hub History

• Michelle Jana Chan muses on the sting of (lovingly) writing a novel that her father has yet to read. | Lit Hub

• “If you’re looking for them, there are also plenty of clues in the book that she would only be ‘the girl next door’ if you lived in a gated community.” Sarah Jaffe considers class and privilege in female comedians’ memoirs. | Lit Hub

• Richard Barnett revisits Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “the most formidably opaque work of modern philosophy.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• Kia Corthron delves into the syntactical challenge of historical fiction. | Lit Hub 

• Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Peter Heller’s The Guide, and Deborah Levy’s Real Estate all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• “My favorite books capture something tangibly and often uncomfortably real.” Author and clinical psychologist S. F. Kosa on the best psychological thrillers. | CrimeReads

• On Keen On, Steve Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro discuss the global epidemic of irrational thinking. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

• “If we want to salvage feminism, you have to remove white racial privilege.” Rafia Zakaria on how race and racism shape modern feminism. | Salon

• Tomi Adeyemi on the books that have made a memorable impact on her personal and creative life. | Elle

• Hilma Wolitzer discusses writing in the wake of her husband’s death from COVID-19. You can read her story “The Last Story in a Long Marriage” here. | Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature

• “The book is both arrival and departure, for both author and readers.” Susan Choi revisits Sigrid Nunez’s 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God. | The Paris Review

• Kira Jane Buxton on her new novel, protecting the environment, and predicting the future through fiction. | Chicago Review of Books

• The librarian of an Illinois high school discovered a copy of the rare, 75-year-old issue of The New Yorker that contained John Hersey’s groundbreaking reporting on the bombing of Hiroshima. | The New Yorker

• From the Chelsea Hotel to Gumby Book Studio and more: dive into the history of New York City’s legendary literary hangouts. | The New York Times

• These authors are working to bring more Afro Latinx stories to children’s literature. | CNN

Also on Lit Hub: Amy Wright on the art of the query • Gordy Sauer recommends books that reimagine the potential of the literary western • Read from Sasha Filipenko’s newly translated novel, Red Crosses (tr. Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner)