Lit Hub Daily: August 31, 2022

TODAY: In 1908, William Saroyanan, Pulitzer Prize-winning Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer is born. 

• “If it weren’t for Beyoncé, another girl like us with an untraceable name, we wouldn’t have had much in common.” Remica Bingham-Risher on stepmotherhood, lineage, and the weight of names. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Ben Mathis-Lilley on the inevitability of college football (and why it’s all Thomas Jefferson’s fault). | Lit Hub Sports

• Rainbows abound on the 11 best book covers of August. | Lit Hub Design

• Mosab Abu Toha considers the past and future of film in Gaza. | Lit Hub Film

• How writers like Dinesh D’Souza invited American conservatives to justify their racism with so-called intellectualism. | Lit Hub Politics

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• “The land where Utah exists haunts our story, but we are even more vast.” Rio Cortez on Afropioneerism and family histories real and imagined. | Lit Hub

• Aviya Kushner delves into the history of Chana Blankshteyn’s Fear and Other Stories, “originally published in Yiddish in 1939, mere weeks before Germany invaded Poland and mere breaths before World War II began.” | The Forward

• Yurina Yoshikawa recommends five translated books from Japan “that feel like antidotes to our accumulated stress of the last few years.” | NPR

• “Lots of people are looking for something scintillating and new and not finding it.” Michelle Goldberg on what an upcoming book by W. David Marx says about cultural stagnation. | The New York Times

• Aina Marti-Balcells and Bibiana Mas, the founders of the new publishing houses Héloïse Books and 3TimesRebel Press, talk about publishing women in translation. | Words Without Borders

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• “He had memories of his ‘wasted years.’ He felt the weight of that wasted time in a way I couldn’t.” How writer Jon Sternfeld finished Michael K. Williams’ posthumous memoir. | GQ

• “There were no villains, and that’s what made it such a difficult story.” Kathleen Hale discusses her new book, Slenderman. | Hazlitt

Also on Lit Hub: Courtney E. Martin on writing about school integration • Untangling my character’s grief from my own • Read from Joe Meno’s latest novel, Book of Extraordinary Tragedies

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