Lit Hub Daily: January 9, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1924, Virginia Woolf buys a house in Bloomsbury, London.
- “I took refuge in the public libraries early and began a life-long love affair with them, one which has sustained me ever since.” Stephen McCauley’s love letter to the places that made him a writer. | Lit Hub
- Hisham Matar, Aube Rey Lescure, Nathaniel Stein and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub
- Happy Tuesday. Here are 22 new books out today. | The Hub
- Vigilantes and vengeance: Elizabeth Flock on the women who fight back. | Lit Hub
- Novelist Karl Marlantes on chronicling the early years of the Cold War. | Lit Hub
- Celebrating Surrealism at 100 (and yes, it’s still relevant). | Lit Hub
- “Captain Jazmín Caldera, native of Zarzales, Extremadura, couldn’t eat the turkey broth with flowers, though it looked exquisite and he was starving.” Read from Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel, translated by Natasha Wimmer. | Lit Hub
- “Late at night, without the option to do my work (pulling ivy), I had to focus on my real work, the enormous pile of unchecked facts, the documents that needed scanning, the sources who needed calling yet again.” Mary Childs on ripping ivy and writing nonfiction. | The Paris Review
- A Florida Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would make it easier for someone accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia to sue for defamation. What could go wrong? | The New Republic
- “It might not be much fun to play, but it’s fantastic as a vibe.” Adrienne Raphel explores the cultural impact of Monopoly. | Atlas Obscura
- Patricia Lockwood weighs in on the (secret) life of poet Molly Brodak. | London Review of Books
- A library, getting into publishing? If you’re the Los Angeles Public Library, it just makes sense. | LA Times
- “Amazon exerts its market-shaping clout to create a profit-fixated monoculture in a publishing industry pushed to maximize short-term returns under successive waves of consolidation.” The Nation goes deep on Amazon’s monopolistic strategies. | The Nation
