Lit Hub Daily: January 9, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1868, The Nation publishes an essay by John William De Forest called “The Great American Novel.” This is the first known use of the term.
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- “Black authors of speculative work sit at the apex of the two issues, frequently relegated to a strange place of hyperinvisibility as if Blackness and speculative fiction are both some extreme ‘other.’” Naomi Day examines the pigeonholing of Black writers. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Are you the asshole if you want to write about someone who ghosted you? Kristen Arnett answers your questions about awkward writerly situations. | Lit Hub Craft
- Emily Yates-Doerr chronicles a family history of illness, government cover-ups, and the unhealed wounds of nuclear testing. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “We are hypervigilant about the potential for our shared social worlds to be undone because we have seen it—lived it—time and again.” Meredith D. Clark on online solidarity and community in the face of fascist takeover. | Lit Hub Technology
- Why did we start drinking milk, anyway? Anne Mendelson explores the prehistoric origins of modern agriculture and human-animal relations. | Lit Hub Food
- “In school I enjoyed studying history even though I was a slow reader.” Read from Rebecca Kauffman’s novel, I’ll Come to You. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “Owens is to helicopter moms what the neuroscientist-cum-health guru Andrew Huberman is to aging bachelors: a tonic for the spiritual ennui of the technocratic striver class.” Matthew Gasda enters the Zibbyverse. | UnHerd
- Jenna Bush Hager is launching a “publishing venture,” Thousand Voices x RHPG, within Penguin Random House. | The New York Times
- H.M.A. Leow considers the hybrid heroines of “Bollywood chick lit.” | JSTOR Daily
- “Can women poets change the discourses in which we are recognized? Or are we doomed to reiterate the genres—the poetry—of which we are made?” Virginia Jackson examines the relationship between women and poetics. | Public Books
- Where are all the ecoterrorists? In books and movies, of course. | The Baffler
- What history can tell us about the impending ban of TikTok, and what the ban might mean for free speech in the future: “As a result, it is now a crime in the United States to advocate for human rights if you do so with a group the government disfavors.” | New York Review of Books
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