Lit Hub Daily: February 24, 2020

TODAY: In 1914, poet Weldon Kees is born.

• “She does not ask to be loved; like Jane Eyre she demands it.” Rachel Vorona Cote on Ramona Quimby and having the right to be “too much.” | Lit Hub
• Did Medgar Evers’ killer go free because of jury tampering? Jerry Mitchell revisits a dark episode in the struggle for civil rights. | Lit Hub History
• Nick Ripatrazone talks to Melissa Grandel, Missouri Teacher of the Year, about community, connection, and hope. | Lit Hub
• A poet’s glimpses of Franco’s Spain: When Langston Hughes went to report on the Spanish Civil War. | Lit Hub History
• Gretel Ehrlich on Yuri Rythkeu’s eulogy for the Arctic, When the Whales Leave. | Lit Hub
• A River of Stars author Vanessa Hua talks Little Women, Parasite, Atonement, and more. | Book Marks
• Nancy Coco takes us on a cozy mystery tour of the Pacific Northwest. | CrimeReads
• “One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different temporalities: it seems we are interested in perpetrators’ futures and victims’ pasts.” Lili Loofbourow on the post-traumatic novel. | NYRB
• Elizabeth Spencer, who died in December at 98, created work with “a trenchant eye for what’s questing and ludicrous and therefore fully human,” Allan Gurganus writes. | The Paris Review
• From Mary Robinson to Robert Jay Lifton, these authors are offering hope in the face of climate crisis. | Yale Climate Connections
• You know what they say: it’s not a real vacation without an underwater library. | Wall Street Journal
• The typewriters Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac used to write A Moveable Feast and Vanity of Duluoz, respectively, will be auctioned later this month. | Paris Express
• A new anthology of literature by incarcerated writers “imagine[s] a future that our words can create,” Daniel Gross writes. | AAWW
• Don’t sleep on the collection of old menus, and more insider tips for navigating the New York Public Library. | Vulture

Also on Lit Hub: Sylvia Plath and the myriad women who know what she went through • Jean Genet on the hidden heart of Jean Cocteau • Read an excerpt from John Sayles’ new novel Yellow Earth.

 

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