Lit Hub Daily: January 28, 2020

• “If I could, I would have left a part of my body behind.” Marcelo Hernandez Castillo in the home of his ancestors. | Lit Hub
• Poverty hurts children in ways we’re just beginning to understand (and “money itself can solve or mitigate many of the problems”). | Lit Hub Politics
• The race for immortality: On pig hearts, placental stem cells, and the search for the aging cure. | Lit Hub Science
• “The clock was ticking down to zero. The game was nearly over.” Craig Pittman on the extreme move that saved Florida panthers from extinction. | Lit Hub Science
• Lydia Denworth on the science of social groups and the desire for friendship that runs deep in all primates. | Lit Hub Science
• Maids author Abby Frucht recommends five books about the politics of women’s bodies in space, from Roxane Gay’s Hunger to Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women. | Book Marks
• On Stephen Joyce, the difficult, stubborn executor of his grandfather’s estate—and maybe the last of his kind. | The Outline
• “Can liberalism diagnose its own ills?” A look at three new books on “the decline of American greatness.” | Bookforum
• Jon Baskin explains what it means to “hate literature” and why Ben Lerner is the quintessential culprit. | The Point
• “That would be the case in a perfect world, one where the game isn’t rigged in favor of the white folks.” Stephen King clarifies a Tweet in which he wrote that he would “never consider diversity in matters of art.” | The Washington Post
• Jerry Craft’s New Kid won this year’s Newberry Medal—the highest honor for children’s literature in the US—becoming the first graphic novel to win the prize. | The New York Times
• Where do things stand at Harvard after a month-long strike by graduate teachers and researchers? | New York Review of Books
• When Raymond Carver invited Charles Bukowski to the University of Santa Cruz, no one wanted to host his party. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: The material horror of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric • The private cost of public heroism: Susan Reyburn on Rosa Parks’ life in Detroit • Read an excerpt of Carola Saavedra’s novel Blue Flowers (trans. Daniel Hahn).