Lit Hub Daily: February 11, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1778, Voltaire returns to Paris after 28 years of exile.
- “I am determined to keep writing, it has never mattered to me more.” Hanif Kureishi on trauma, recovery and what it means to be a writer. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Just in time for Valentine’s Day: 25 writers explain the anatomy of a good sex scene. | Lit Hub Craft
- Pankaj Mishra on nationalism, modernity and how the horrors in Gaza were shaped by other atrocities of the 20th century. | Lit Hub History
- Need something to read this week? Maybe you should try one of the 27 new books out today! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Haley Mlotek, Shane McCrae, Maggie Su and more authors take the Lit Hub questionnaire: “I’ll always choose the sentence that feels better than a more straightforward one, sacrificing clarity and grammar alike, and there’s just never a time when a gaudy sentence is better than a simple one.” | Lit Hub Craft
- “We simply have not and were not able to stop this genocide.” Mohammed El-Kurd on Palestine and the complexities of resilience and victimhood. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Lauren Francis-Sharma recommends books that explore South African identity by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, J. M. Coetzee, Mohale Mashigo, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “I wrote this when I was watching the news during the Standing Rock Protests and was thinking about how the protesters were fighting for the rights of future generations.” Amanda Peters on her short story collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “Slept poorly. The light from the green exit sign above my cabin door was too bright, and the ticking and cracking of the wooden building in the wind kept me awake.” Read from Charlotte Wood’s novel, Stone Yard Devotional. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “As dense and sometimes forbidding as Capital can be, it has spoken to many audiences.” Alyssa Battistoni revisits Marx’s masterpiece. | The Nation
- “Nothing New”: A (newly) rediscovered poem by Robert Frost. | The New Yorker
- “This is the chance for a change, an exchange of positions or a swapping of partners in the pederastic psychagogy of reading.” Peter Szendy considers Phaedrus and the erotics of rereading. | The Paris Review
- Paisley Currah on the “full-throated explicit dehumanization” of trans people in America. | n+1
- Barbara Kingsolver has put the royalties from Demon Copperhead toward building a women’s rehab center in Appalachia. | The New York Times
- Lincoln Michel asks, why is ChatGPT a balloon while books are bicycles? | Counter Craft
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