Lit Hub Daily: February 16, 2022

• “She was a renaissance woman in the most exemplary sense.” Morgan Jerkins on the underread Jessie Redmon Fauset. | Lit Hub History

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• Ilan Stevens in praise of the American library, an “essential ingredient” of democracy. | Lit Hub Bookstores & Libraries

• “Few others so relentlessly place the human subject and the cosmos side by side.” A close reading of Kathryn Davis. | Lit Hub Criticism

• “Dialogue is embarrassing.” Sarah Manguso talks about finally writing a novel, on Thresholds. | Lit Hub Radio

• Why do we keep returning to Alice and her wonderland? Erin Morgenstern has some thoughts. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• The terrors and wonders of the North: Bernd Brunner searches for the mythical Viking of yore. | Lit Hub History

• The best crime and mystery debuts of February. | CrimeReads

• R.L. Stine, Casey Plett, a masterclass of self-deception, and more Rapid-Fire Book Recs from Alex McElroy. | Book Marks

• P.J. O’Rourke has died.

• Art Spiegelman talks about why banning books never works: “It ignites the interest in reading what is forbidden.” | El País

• Nicole Clark’s argument for why we should read more romance novels. | Polygon

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• Niamh Campbell explores what makes a good literary sex scene—and where writing about sex can go wrong. | The Guardian

• Why do some authors’ books get serialized designs? | Eye on Design

• “All in all, I’m a sort of literary smuggler. I try to smuggle forgotten, less known literary values to ‘Western audiences.’” Adam Dalva talks to the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić. | Full Stop

• Lauren Michele Jackson considers the “Hurstonian mode” in the newly published collection of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing. | The New Yorker

• “His tutelage of other writers is as integral to his legacy as his criticism.” Stephen Kearse on the immortal influence of Greg Tate. | The Nation

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Also on Lit Hub: Deeply flawed mother figures of literature • A poem by Ben Estes • Read from Alejandro Zambra’s newly translated novel, Chilean Poet (tr. Megan McDowell)