Lit Hub Daily: February 28, 2020

• Beat back the winter doldrums by gazing upon some of February’s most beautiful book covers. | Lit Hub
• Zee Francis ventures deep into the queer subtext of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. | Lit Hub Criticism
• From weird literary romances to a love affair in Patricia Highsmith’s margins: The Lit Hub staff’s favorite stories of the month. | Lit Hub
• Robert Moses vs. FDR: How city planning wiped out New York’s “Little Syria.” | Lit Hub History
• Michael Smith on how lust, emotional intimacy, and honeypots influence spy games and shape the world order. | CrimeReads
• Catherine Pugh, a former mayor of Baltimore, was sentenced to three years in prison for her role in a scandal involving her self-published “Healthy Holly” children’s book series. | The Hub
• Lynn Steger Strong on the “delusions around meritocracy continue to pervade the writing world”—and the stark financial realities of being a writer. | The Guardian
• Mary Gaitskill reflects on her love for the “incredibly dick-centric” Henry Miller. | Vulture
  Why you should encourage your kids to read graphic novels (for starters, c they’re novels). | Washington Post
• Olivia Gatwood discusses growing up in New Mexico and how gendered violence has affected her work as a poet. | Vice
• “We dreaded the feeling of that foreign language in our mouths; those native speakers watching us, their expert ears listening for mistakes.” Jennifer Tseng on learning Chinese phrases as a child. | The Paris Review
• Paris was well-known for welcoming many African-American artists and writers throughout the mid-20th century, but where exactly in the city did people like James Baldwin and Richard Wright hang out? | CNN

Also on Lit Hub: How Italian horror movies helped Kevin Killian understand the AIDS crisis • Dorothea Lasky and Julia Guez in conversation • Read a story by Kathryn Harlan from the Fall 2019 issue of The Gettysburg Review.