Lit Hub Daily: February 23, 2023

TODAY: In 1892, American journalist, writer, and activist Agnes Smedley is born.  

• “They are as welcome as a letter from home. They are as popular as pin-up girls.” How paperbacks distributed to WWII soldiers became a lifeline—and created a generation of readers. | Lit Hub History

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• Gulchehra Hoja recounts life under Chinese rule for the Uyghurs. | Lit Hub

• 7 books about messy, (es)strange(d), surreal families. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Ahead of the Oscars, here’s everything you need to know about Martin McDonagh, the polarizing British-Irish filmmaker behind The Banshees of Inisherin. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Why Reid Mitenbuler became captivated by eccentric explorer Peter Freuchen: “I recognized in him a cask-strength version of the wanderlust that, to some extent, drives all of us.” | Lit Hub Biography

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• Joseph Earl Thomas on finding a safe reprieve from a traumatic childhood during a stay in the hospital. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Vivian Gornick on Janet Malcolm’s posthumous memoir, Reginald Dwayne Betts on an oral history of Rikers, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Julia Bartz on the new wave of psychological thrillers featuring unapologetic female psychopaths. | CrimeReads

• David Waldstreicher unearths Ron DeSantis’s long-ignored 2011 book: “For DeSantis, Black people telling a different story about the American past is a threat to his entire worldview.” | The Atlantic

• Charlotte Vassell ranks the top 10 cads in fiction. | The Guardian

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• “How have we come to imbue the split-second emotional response with so much cultural and moral value?” William Davies examines life in the reaction economy. | London Review of Books

• What Dickens and Prince can teach us about creativity. | The Millions

• “Words like ‘prodigy’ and ‘precocious’ dominate the commentary on Delany’s early novels. Understandably so.” Never a bad day for an ode to Samuel Delany. | JSTOR Daily

• This is how the singularity starts, isn’t it? How ChatGPT books are flooding Amazon. | Fudzilla

• Why Alexander the Great was treated with hostility in Zoroastrian literature. | Scroll

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Also on Lit Hub: Robin Yeatman on the dangers of a fertile fantasy life • Anthony Anaxagorou on poetry at the intersection of colonialism and patriarchy • Read from Stênio Gardel’s newly translated novel, The Words That Remain (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato)

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