Lit Hub Daily: February 17, 2021
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1912, science fiction and fantasy writer Andre Alice Norton is born.
- María José Ferrada remembers accompanying her father, a traveling salesman, around Chile, and how those trips inspired her novel. | Lit Hub
- “What if we turned toward sex—in its infinite variation—for advice about structure?” Helen Betya Rubinstein on sex as narrative. | Lit Hub Craft
- Emily Temple recommends 50 classic novels under 200 pages, because what is an attention span and where can we buy one? | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “We are by turns euphoric and wistful, furious and enervated, despairing, suicidal, and dare I say the word, hopeful?” Gretel Erlich introduces Orion’s best political writing of the past 20 years. | Lit Hub Climate Change
- Howard Sherman on the Our Town spinoff you never heard about, written solely for wartime inspiration. | Lit Hub History
- Michael Patrick F. Smith finds a model in Theodore Roosevelt, fellow former pip-squeak who returned from North Dakota “husky, lusty, and brown and tough as a hickory knot.” | Lit Hub Memoir
- Turns out, asurprising number of crime-writing careers begin during maternity leave. | CrimeReads
- Back in 1885, critics called Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn both a “tour de force” and “a piece of careless hackwork.” | Book Marks
- From Charles Dickens’ automaton police force to Frank L. Baum’s original Tiktok: Rebecca Morgan Frank on literature’s long-standing relationship with robots. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Fake Amazon reviews are for sale “in bulk” across the internet (yet another reason to shop indie). | BBC
- “The reason you careers fell for us in the first place is that we managed to be unsteady and unreliable even in the most stable and predigested situations.” A break-up letter to a writing career. | N+1
- Can historians be traumatized by violence they experience through “imagination and immersion”? | The New Republic
- On Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was forced to live in isolation, and how to cope with living in lockdown. | The Guardian
- “You have to figure out a way to live in the world, that’s life.” Mariame Kaba discusses activism, abolition, and transformative justice. | Chicago Reader
- Bernard Ferguson on the poetic lineage of Gwendolyn Brooks and why “it seems everything—the poems, the music, the seasons—points me back to her.” | The Paris Review
- “I don’t think that any of us can say that we’re having a good time right now, can we?” Patricia Lockwood on writing and the internet. | LARB
Also on Lit Hub: Kevin Young on how the Schomburg Center became Harlem’s literary sanctuary • Theo Padnos on surviving captivity in Syria • Read from Lia Levi’s newly translated novel, Tonight is Already Tomorrow (trans. Clarissa Botsford)
Article continues after advertisement
Lit Hub Daily
The best of the literary Internet, every day, brought to you by Literary Hub.



















