Lit Hub Daily: February 1, 2023

TODAY: In 1991, Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka dance over the ashes of Langston Hughes at the dedication ceremony for the cosmogram at New York’s Schomburg Center.  

• “This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.” On Toni Morrison’s vision of a Black revival in Beloved. | Lit Hub Criticism

• How Donald Trump buys his way out of jail (again and again). | Lit Hub Politics

• “People mistake nationalism for love of place.” V (formerly Eve Ensler) muses on capitalism, community, and connection. | Lit Hub Politics

• Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, Roshani Chokshi’s The Last Tale of the Flower Bride, Matt Ruff’s The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country, and more of February’s most-anticipated Sci-Fi and Fantasy titles. | Book Marks

• “It’s time we accept that Bravo’s Real Housewives has become our modern-day film noir.” Jumata Emill on a favorite franchise’s crimey qualities. | CrimeReads

• Greetings, aliens: NASA is sending an Ada Limón poem into space. | The Hub

• “Disdain for conformity and a complicated hunger for money are insistent motifs.” Hannah Gold on Patricia Highsmith’s New York years. | The New Yorker

• Gina Apostol on José Rizal, poet, novelist, and national hero: “To the credit of Filipinos, we have imagined a nation through Rizal’s OG fiction.” | LARB

• Patrick Sauer on the enduring legacy of The Outsiders. | Smithsonian Magazine

• “If we can reclaim our attention and pay attention to things that really matter, there a revolution starts.” Robin Wall Kimmerer and David Marchese in conversation. | The New York Times Magazine

• Kristen Martin reflects on what we can learn from death memoirs. | The Baffler

• Madeline McIntosh will step down as the CEO of Penguin Random House US. | Publishers Weekly

Also on Lit Hub: How to tell a true survivor story • Daniel Black on the oppressive role of Christianity in black culture • Read from Jen Calleja’s latest novel, Vehicle: A Verse Novel

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