Lit Hub Daily: February 21, 2018

• Happy birthday, Eustace Tilley! Here are 20 iconic covers of your magazine, The New Yorker. | Literary Hub
• Happy birthday, W.H. Auden! Here is Hannah Arendt remembering how swell you were… | Literary Hub
• Zan Romanoff finds joy and intimacy in the personal writing outlet. | Literary Hub
• “I didn’t expect the best things, and I have turned loss into a fortune—a personal pleasure.” Terese Marie Mailhot on motherhood, ghosts, and inherited sorrow. | Literary Hub
• What if Kafka was the best relationship of my twenties? Rebecca Schuman shares the shameful joy of a life devoted to German. | Literary Hub
• “A critic isn’t just writing for today’s audience; a critic is part of a cultural conversation that, in the best cases, outlives us all.” Bethanne Patrick on reading and reviewing in the internet age. | Book Marks
• To commemorate International Women’s Day and the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the UK, Penguin is opening a pop-up in London stocked entirely with titles by women. | Jezebel
• “I’m basically nuts. I sit by myself every day, most days, eight hours in this little room.” David Mamet on writing his first crime novel. | Vulture
• “While perhaps not surprising, it is deeply disturbing.” On the FBI’s war against black-owned independent bookstores during the height of the Black Panther movement. | The Atlantic
• “The subtlest joy of these essays is sensing Smith’s own personhood, a personhood inseparable from her intellectual life. The self encompasses both.” Hermione Hoby on Zadie Smith’s Feel Free. | New Republic
• “For people that smoke so much cannabis, there’s a serious lack of creativity.” Where is all the great writing about weed? | The Outline
• Men, at it again: A study has revealed a “a fairly stunning decline” in the proportion of female novelists and characters from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. | The Guardian
• After firing his lawyers and vowing to represent himself in court, Milo Yiannopoulos has instead filed papers to drop his $10 million lawsuit against Simon & Schuster. (May we never hear from him again). | AP

Also on Literary Hub: When Vogue went to Russia: On glossy magazines and aspirational normalcy in post-Soviet Russia · Krystal A. Sital reckons with the complexities of Trinidad · Read from David Keenan’s new novel, This Is Memorial Device.