Lit Hub Daily: February 13, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1881, the feminist newspaper La Citoyenne is first published in Paris by the activist Hubertine Auclert.
- “With his authoritarian orders, the president—and his unelected South African Rasputin—have eliminated the fundamental tools of discussion and debate, namely words themselves.” Rob Spillman on self-censorship and why writers, editors, and publishers should not obey in advance. | Lit Hub Politics
- Maris Kreizman on why dropping book blurbs might be easier said than done. | Lit Hub Craft
- Niall Williams, Mary Oliver, Muriel Spark and more authors are on Sonya Walger’s TBR. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Her books for adults are rich and complex, revealing the stickiness of human coexistence.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- “Even if the world has changed, her characters’ struggles with becoming themselves continue to be familiar.” On Alba de Céspedes’s There’s No Turning Back. | Lit Hub On Translation
- Rich Benjamin on making sense of a vanishing Haitian heritage and the kidnapping that changed his family. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Erling Kagge on the 19th-century craze to reach the North Pole and the timeless phenomenon of human hubris. | Lit Hub History
- “Our first and last words…shed light on practices and beliefs about babies, the dying, language itself, and the very nature of existence.” Michael Erard explores the science behind what we say at the beginning and end of life. | Lit Hub Science
- “Swollen nuggets of ice fell from the August sky as if to announce summer’s refusal to be predictable.” Read from Lauren Francis-Sharma’s novel, Casualties of Truth. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “The culture industries have been thoroughly colonized by complex financial players (mainly hedge funds and private-equity groups) and their warped logics of sociality.” Ryan Boyd explores the death of culture at the hands of finance. | Public Books
- Hermione Hoby considers the proliferation of the Divorce Plot. | Bookforum
- “The people who shape this future need to be us Palestinians—not the people who made Gaza look like a demolition site, or who now seem to think that an entire people should be demolished, too.” Mosab Abu Toha on the rebuilding of Gaza. | The New Yorker
- Remembering Walter Robinson, “artist, writer, and human bullshit detector.” | Vulture
- Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Sam Graham-Felsen discuss Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. | Roth & Company
- Christopher B. Daly chronicles how 100 years ago, The New Yorker came to be. | The Conversation
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