Lit Hub Daily: August 9, 2017

TODAY: In 1922, Philip Larkin is born. 

• Lit Hub Longform: On the history of respectability politics and their failure to keep black Americans safe. | Literary Hub
• John Berger contemplates life and death at the graveside of Mahmoud Darwish. | Literary Hub
• The apocalypse is now: Ashley Selby proposes a new climate change genre, First Impact fiction. | Literary Hub
• Lindsay Hunter talks about writing a novel while parenting, and the deep joy of assless pants. | Literary Hub
• A wake for the cold war: Martin Amis’s 1997 review of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a novel centered around the “moral void” of nuclear weapons, “with [their] exorbitant terror and absurdity.” | Book Marks
• “It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day.” In honor of this month’s upcoming solar eclipse, The Atlantic has republished Annie Dillard’s classic 1982 essay “Total Eclipse.” | The Atlantic
• The seven words George Carlin famously joked could never be said on TV are flourishing in American literature: a new study found that contemporary books are “28 times more likely to include swearwords than books published in the early 1950s.” | The Guardian
• “I learned I had no fear of machines. I liked carrying coils of cables on my shoulder; it made me feel tough and cool.” An excerpt from Ellen Ulman’s memoir Life in Code. | The New Republic
• “Our whole history has been about imposing order on things that cannot be controlled.” Hermione Hoby goes for a drive with South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic. | The New Yorker
• “Many people don’t want to contemplate, in their escapist lit, their nation’s plunge into fascism or worse.” On the recent proliferation of dystopic literature and pop culture—and the handwringing that has sometimes accompanied it. | The Village Voice
• One of the ways we survive darkness is to find reasons to laugh: an interview with Stay with Me author Ayobami Adebayo. | The Paris Review
• “When the day comes that the internet commentariat cleaves into opposing sides for war of attrition over this book and film, it will in part be a war premised on misunderstanding.” On the source material behind Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming yet already divisive Ready Player One. | Deadspin

Also on Lit Hub: On the crime (fiction) of Glasgow · Novelists-turned-screenwriters, Tom Perrotta and Noah Hawley, talk shop · Get a first look at Safe, Ryan Gattis’s new novel.

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