Lit Hub Daily: August 3, 2022

TODAY: In 1878, Guy de Maupassant writes to Gustave Flaubert, complaining about the monotony of his life and his new job as an employee of the Ministry of Public Instruction in France. Flaubert is not impressed. 

• Jana Casale considers the particular agony of visiting a bookstore as a debut author. | Lit Hub Writing Life

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• Meet the Radical Books Collective, a group of global south writers who are decolonizing literature. | Lit Hub

• Emma Seckle muses on the Celtic legend of an airborne fairy, and how history, myth, and folklore shape contemporary stories. | Lit Hub Criticism

• “What better way to get to know a person, and to understand him, then to deconstruct his reading book by book?” Susan Coll on falling in love with—and at—a bookstore. | Lit Hub Bookstores

• From blood magic to a pandemic of sleeplessness, here are 10 new SFF books to augment your August. | Book Marks

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• Hayley Scrivenor on Greek choruses and collective narration. | CrimeReads

• Revisiting Judith Rossner’s 1983 novel, August, which “gets its title from the cruellest month, in psychoanalytic terms, when many therapists, especially the fancy Manhattan ones, tend to take their vacations.” | The New Yorker

• “I can’t write today. All I can do is masturbate while listening to Monchy & Alexandra.” Andrea Abreu on internet searches and intimacy. | Astra Magazine

• “What I want to tell you is as delicate as life itself. And I want to use the delicacy that exists inside me along with the peasant coarseness that is my saving grace.” Read selections from Clarice Lispector’s long-running Saturday newspaper column. | The Paris Review

• Rhian Sasseen considers Izumi Suzuki’s “brash, clever, odd works of science fiction, propelled by an irreverent kind of up yours! energy.” | The Baffler

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• Anna Sergeeva talks to editor Olena Rybka about publishing books in a time of war. and Ukraine’s literary identity. | Guernica

• Look inside librarian Sharon McKellar’s collection of the many items people leave behind in returned library books. | NPR

• Read Shira Ovide’s analysis of the unspoken role that Amazon is playing in the Penguin Random House antitrust trial. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Lynne Tillman on watching a mother’s final days • Read a new poem by Claire Schwartz • Read from Andrea Abreu’s newly translated novel, Dogs of Summer (tr. Julia Sanches)

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