Lit Hub Daily: July 10, 2023

• How J. Robert Oppenheimer used one of his favorite books, the Bhagavad Gita, to make the most consequential decision of the 20th century. | Lit Hub History

• Truman Capote became the “it” author of his generation after publishing In Cold Blood. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. | Lit Hub Biography

• “As it turns out, a good novel is more than a stack of bangers in a trench coat.” Ruth Madievsky on burying her darlings. | Lit Hub Craft

• Against stand-ins: On writing straight characters while queer. | Lit Hub

• “The West is the world’s biggest gated community.” Sally Hayden on the dehumanization of migration. | Lit Hub Politics

• “Almost all the writing I have done since having children has been on a couch, when a baby is napping on top of me or nursing, scribbling in my notebook.” Kate Zambreno and Emily Raboteau in conversation. | Orion

• “The great theologian of our America, I propose, is the novelist Thomas Pynchon.” Alan Jacobs on Pynchon’s teleology of the human. | The Hedgehog Review

• Joshua Fagan considers the scientific socialism of H.G. Wells. | Jacobin

• Julie Irigaray revisits Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant.” | The Poetry Foundation

• “For me, writing and erasing myself are one and the same; a sentence succeeds because it conjures up something other than me.” Hernan Diaz on the adaptation of his novel Trust. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Oliver de la Paz on using sonnets to capture life in a diaspora • Christine Grillo on self-soothing with satire • Read a story from Erika Kobayashi’s newly translated collection Sunrise (tr. Brian Bergstrom)