Lit Hub Daily: February 20, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1895, Frederick Douglass dies.
- Leslie Jamison talks to Mitzi Rapkin about the construction of the self as a literary act. | Lit Hub Radio
- “As a little girl, I was a huge disappointment to my Japanese grandmother when it came to food.” Amanda Churchill on embracing her Japanese heritage through food. | Lit Hub Food
- Why do we love antiheroes? On America’s love-hate affair with outsiders and outlaws. | Lit Hub Film
- Leslie Jamison, Michiko Kakutani, Hana Videen, Miriam Darlington, Lyz Lenz, and more. Here are twenty-three new books out today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
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“Malcolm believed that Muhammad’s teachings saved him from rotting away in prison; saved him from assimilationist ideas of wanting to be White; saved him from ignorance of Black history and humanity.” Ibram X Kendi on George Breitman and the enduring legacy of Malcolm X. | Lit Hub History
- Joan Acocella examines how The Prophet made Kahlil Gibran a New Age icon in America. | Lit Hub Biography
- “Do Palestinian lives have the same value to us? Do we also know the names of their dead babies, their humiliated grandparents and murdered children?” Ramsey Nasr on Gaza and the right to dignity. | Lit Hub Politics
- “The woman who pioneered the migration called herself Eleanor to Mr. Flint, no surname, and this not her actual name at all. To the no-longer-slaves she called herself Saint. The man that traveled with her was nameless and speechless.” Read from Phillip B. Williams’ new novel, Ours. | Lit Hub Fiction
- What do Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and A. A. Milne have in common? They all got tired of writing the characters they were most known for. | The Atlantic
- Ron DeSantis claims that he didn’t actually enable book bans as he begins to backtrack on his own policies. | The New Republic
- “Moser’s book reads almost like a ghost story of the repressed history of coastal California, its lost ecologies of abundance, the development of its racially segregated industrial garden, and the eclipse and appropriation of forms of proletarian bohemianism.” On surfing and infrastructures. | Public Books
- “My overflowing shelves reflect my literary tastes: chaotic, promiscuous and shallow.” An interview with Ed Zwick. | The New York Times
- What’s going on with the Hugo Awards? Zoe Guy explains. | Vulture
- “Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry, their writing processes, page versus spoken-word, American vs British poetics.” Oluwaseun Olayiwola on generation gaps and aging. | Granta
