Lit Hub Daily: January 26, 2022

Featured image: Photo by KK Ottesen from “Activist: Portraits of Courage”

TODAY: In 1944, Angela Davis is born. 

• 10 books for being alone, depending on the tenor of your loneliness (and your appetite for misery). | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “What to do with these echoes? What to do with this history?” David L. Ulin wanders the back streets of Old Hollywood. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Tomiko Brown-Nagin looks at the early career of Constance Baker Motley, the pioneering black female lawyer who took racism to court. | Lit Hub History

• “For people who really do live like Bruno, as I once did, isolated in their homes, ashamed of their obsessions and compulsions, this representation is all too real.” Rachel May on Encanto’s OCD allegory. | Lit Hub Film & TV

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• On the time-defying architecture and creative friendship between Frederick Law Olmsted and Henry Hobson Richardson. | Lit Hub Architecture

• Fantasies of bunkering: David Pike recommends 1970s women-authored science fiction and fantasy. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Train Dreams, Harriet the Spy, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and more rapid-fire book recs from Jamie Harrison. | Book Marks

• Zadie Smith on the genius of Toni Morrison’s only short story. | The New Yorker

• “If it’s true that prison education cannot change prisons, I’m not sure I could renounce it given a second chance.” Daniel Fernandez on the purgatory of prison classrooms. | The Baffler

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• Twelve years after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Kettly Mars reflects on the literature of the disaster. | Words Without Borders

• “Sometimes even the most profound and important things are forgotten, and that’s why we have stories.” On Queer Eye and storytelling. | Hyperallergic

• Suzanne Van Atten looks at Imani Perry’s South to America, which contends “that the South has had a tremendous impact on the history of our nation and that it continues to exert significant influence today.” | LARB

• Vauhini Vara, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and other Colorado-based authors talk about their upcoming books. | The Denver Post

• Laura Miller praises John Darnielle’s books, which have “an idiosyncratic flavor most unlike the usual run of literary fiction, even if they share some of its concerns.” | Slate

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Also on Lit Hub: Imani Perry on writing the story of the American South • Silvina López Medin explores the world of a family • Read from John Darnielle’s latest novel, Devil House 

Top photo by KK Ottesen from the book, Activist.

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