Lit Hub Daily: February 5, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1948, a private assembly of 50 major literary and artistic figures listens to a recording of Antonin Artaud‘s play Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu, whose broadcast on French radio three days earlier has been prohibited.
- The making of an anti-woke zealot: How (shadow president) Elon Musk was infected with the MAGA mind-virus. | Lit Hub Politics
- “I hope readers see a fundamentally serious novel beneath the playful exterior, and take it as a call to action to do all they can to avoid the hellish world it depicts from becoming a reality.” Rahul Bery reflects on translating Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy. | Lit Hub On Translation
- Tess Chakkalakal examines how shared Southern roots brought Charles W. Chesnutt and Walter Hines Page together: “That these two North Carolinians, living on opposite sides of the color line, found common cause in the pages of The Atlantic among the literary elite of Boston is just the beginning of a new story about an old American problem.” | Lit Hub Biography
- “Home to Harlem was the first bestselling novel by a Black author in the United States, propelled by white readers fascinated by Harlem’s famed nightlife.” On displacement and belonging in Claude McKay’s landmark novel. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Jessica Soffer recommends essential love stories by Ocean Vuong, Emma Straub, Andre Aciman, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- How do we find purpose and fulfillment in a chaotic world? Shigehiro Oishi considers the factors and practices that lead to a meaningful life. | Lit Hub Science
- “Let’s call it Dream House. Dungeon conjures up the wrong image.” Read from Brittany Newell’s novel, Soft Core. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “People are not incorrect about Octavia Butler predicting the future, but they’re not always clear about what kind of future she was envisioning.” Hanif Abdurraqib on Octavia Butler, the L.A. fires, and the end of the world. | The New Yorker
- If your public library uses Hoopla to manage its digital collection, you (and your librarians) may need to be on the lookout for AI slush. | 404 Media
- “From the years before the Civil War up to today, then, civility advocates have insisted on politeness. But, as Douglass shows, that distracts from urgent problems that “honesty” would demand addressing directly.” Timothy Donahue on why politeness is counterrevolutionary. | Public Books
- Sam Kriss asks, how alt is alt lit? | The Point
- “And mutualism, as symbiotic cooperation is called in biology, is vital to life itself.” On Peter Kropotkin and Mutual Aid. | JSTOR Daily
- André Nafis-Sahely considers new collections by Frank X. Walker and E. Hughes, and “the power of documentary poetry to place us inside the minds and hearts of real individuals long since anonymized by history.” | Poetry
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