Lit Hub Daily: January 25, 2023

• Introducing a new indie press, Great Place Books: “We want to be a home for books that are allowed to remain ambitious and weird.” | Lit Hub

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• “My dive into Weimar Germany taught me that authoritarianism doesn’t always follow a linear path.” Travis Mushett on his project to understand present-day America through films from an earlier era of social instability. | Lit Hub Film

• Freedom Summer: How a group of Black activists inspired change in segregated Mississippi. | Lit Hub History

• Kathryn Ma recalls the summer she spent assisting a science librarian—who also happened to be her mom. | Lit Hub Memoir

• “Tolkien’s characters remain largely static; it’s the world around them that changes.” Austin Gilkeson on the challenges of adapting Tolkien’s fiction for television. | The New York Review

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• From The Secret History to Dept. of Speculation, a reading list of betrayals. curated by Judas Goat author Gabrielle Bates. | Electric Lit

• Journalist Victor S. Navasky has died at 90. | The New York Times

• “Weighing in on ‘the way we live now’ entails new scrutiny on that ‘we.’” Molly Fischer profiles Pamela Paul, “a provocateur temperamentally averse to provocation.” | The New Yorker

• A history of the FBI spying on people’s library activity. | The Washington Post

• Lincoln Michel considers the long-promised “techno book revolution” that never seems to arrive. | Counter Craft

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Also on Lit Hub: A reading list of happy endings to brighten up dark January days • How Thoreau reckoned with the loss of his brother • Read from Paul Harding’s latest novel, This Other Eden