Lit Hub Daily: February 17, 2022

TODAY: In 1955, Mo Yan (referred to by TIME magazine as “one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers”) is born.   

• “I left America not only to find freedom but as an instinctive act of self-preservation.” Tiffanie Drayton on the abuses of American life. | Lit Hub Politics

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• Inquiring minds want to know: what do words taste like? | Lit Hub Science

• “Even while she lived, fiction gnawed on truth.” Catherine Ostler on piecing together the life of socialite and bigamist Elizabeth Chudleigh. | Lit Hub History

• The literature of “little emperors”: Megan Walsh considers contemporary Chinese writing. | Lit Hub

• How Mary Jane Drips Barnes relied on Indian and Anglo-American family strategies to protect indigenous land from white homesteaders. | Lit Hub History

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• Alexandra Kleeman on Sheila Heti, Rachel Khong on Julie Otsuka, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Maigret was Georges Simenon’s most famous creation—but his intense, psychological noirs left a legacy all their own. | CrimeReads

• Words Without Borders offers seven pieces of prose and poetry that center Ukranian voices. | Words Without Borders

• “A literary world without any magazines would figure out ways to adjust. But it would be a poorer place.” Lincoln Michel on what we lose when we lose literary magazines. | Counter Craft

• Alice Whitmore explores the movement to name translators on book covers, and considers who can afford to remain anonymous. | Sydney Review of Books

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• “For Wharton, the literature of the social real and the literature of the uncanny are one and the same, for they are both the literature of human nature and relationships.” Jennifer R. Bernstein on Edith Wharton’s ghosts. | Boston Review

• “If I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t know what else to do.” Sasha Fletcher on writing about love while the world falls apart. | Joyland

• Goodbye to all that: Meghan Daum on leaving NYC for LA. | Oldster

• Christina Fogarasi considers the “ever-evolving trauma plot.” | LARB

Also on Lit Hub: Olivia Campbell considers the legendary absorption of the dancer • A poem by Brian Tierney • Read from Adrian Nathan West’s latest novel, My Father’s Diet 

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