Lit Hub Daily: February 25, 2022

TODAY: In 1928, American novelist and short story writer Richard Gustave Stern is born.  

• Should the Internet Novel make way for the Encyclopedic Novel? James Webster makes the case for endless scroll over fragmentation. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• Gabrielle Civil recommends the books you need for Black History Month and beyond. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• From National Velvet to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, nine Liz Taylor films to watch on (what would have been) her 90th birthday. | Lit Hub Film

• Storied landscape, sacred text: Greg Harris on how California’s waterways gave life to Indigenous communities. | Lit Hub Nature

• “A rough patch in a story is not an error or a defect or evidence of our lack of talent or proof that we are imposters.” Some reassuring writing advice from George Saunders. | Lit Hub Craft

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• Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers, Roddy Doyle’s Life Without Children, and Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• “Trotter and his collaborators force viewers into a complex and sometimes even uncomfortable conversation about the substance of racial identity.” Reginald Dwayne Betts on the work of Tariq Trotter. | New York Times Magazine

• Andrew Solomon and Claudia Rankine discuss the democratic crisis, opting out of harmful discourse, and writing without an intended audience. | Interview

• “Tell your circle of close friends that you were barred from the library for reading too much, too soon, too quickly,” and more foolproof tips for appearing to read a lot, from Maeve Higgins. | The New Yorker

• Margaret Atwood explains her preoccupation with The Wizard of Oz. | Los Angeles Times

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• “When old ties are reconnected or a bygone event recalled, how could the past and the future take shape in the present?” Hantian Zhang on memory and the concept of palimpsest. | The Offing

• Marlize Duncan recommends five books by Black authors that have been banned by some public school libraries in the US. | BuzzFeed

• “We think of the public library as a constant through history. But in fact, it’s not.” Andrew Pettegree talks about the history and civic role of libraries. | Christian Science Monitor

Also on Lit Hub: Pandemic movies can actually be… good? • How to tell when you have a short story collection • Read a story from Kim Fu’s new collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

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