Lit Hub Daily: February 19, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1917, Carson McCullers is born.
- Gabrielle Bellot on how the linguistic erasure of trans people also erases them from history and life: “To only refer to “LGB” history, then, isn’t just a petty linguistic choice. It erases history, creating a new, bowdlerized version of that history instead, a revisionist past in which people like me were not present.” | Lit Hub Politics
- “I wanted a visceral novel, one that could be felt as sensually as Bondarchuk’s scarves grazing the camera.” Elyse Durham on drawing inspiration from Sergei Bondarchuk’s iconic War and Peace adaptation. | Lit Hub Film
- Alex Zamalin on the political power of American countercultures and “revolutionary freedom.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “It didn’t even occur to me that there were women writers whom Austen had used as models—and whose books I could read, too.” Rebecca Romney on her quest to unearth Jane Austen’s influences. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Emily J. Smith meditates on what emails from her dad taught her about the craft of writing. | Lit Hub Craft
- Nick Newman explains what novelists can learn from playing Elden Ring. | Lit Hub Technology
- Yoni Appelbaum explores how the Pilgrims influenced modern ideas about migration. | Lit Hub History
- How walking helped Simone and Hélène de Beauvoir make art: “Simone’s hiking was nothing like Nietzsche’s ‘walking’ or Thoreau’s ‘sauntering.’ She marched. Like a machine.” | Lit Hub Craft
- “Afterwards, you told me it was part of what you loved most about those weeks.” Read from Madeleine Watts’s novel, Elegy, Southwest. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “It strikes me that neither my father nor I, nor the people encountered on this trip, nor my grandmother in that city in northern China, worship the past.” Aube Rey Lescure on returning to China. | Granta
- Sean Hooks talks to Claire Messud about This Strange Eventful History, art discourse, and “the amazing complexities of what we can express and convey in language if people will only make the effort and take the time.” | Public Books
- Nina Renata Aron considers noses and Moshtari Hilal’s Ugliness. | Dirt
- Mitch Anzuoni chronicles the search for The Spiritual Hunt, Rimbaud’s lost manuscript. | The MIT Press Reader
- “Shulamith attended the launch of her book that we arranged at a small East Village gallery on Avenue A. She was too shy to read from the book, so the reading was done by some of her friends” Chris Kraus on Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces. | n+1
- On the life and work of poet, scholar, and filmmaker Beatriz Nascimento: “For Nascimento, the memories of Black Brazilians and especially the political force of quilombos formed a map of autonomous lifeways to be reanimated and reinvented.” | The Nation
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