Lit Hub Daily: July 15, 2022

• “I was still an English Learner, for crying out loud; how could I ever imagine working in the movie industry?” How rummaging through Oliver Stone’s home office allowed a young Rafael Agustín to dream big. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• If “empathy towards other species and toward nature is the only way out of our current ecological predicament”—are we screwed? | Lit Hub

• “The Fleabag-ification of Anne Elliot is more nuanced and insidious than a simple mistranslation of Anne’s personality.” Emmeline Clein on the self-hating heroine who embraces irony over catharsis. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Why degrowth is imperative for a globally just future. | Lit Hub Politics

• Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, CJ Hauser’s The Crane Wife, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• Fickle and unbreakable: 7 great novels about friendships between young women. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “With Half Outlaw, I wanted to explore the idea of how family members can love and hurt one another at the same time.” Alex Temblador on writing a complex criminal family. | CrimeReads

• “We are talking about Black lives and serious topics more openly now. Children’s books are part of that revolution.” Meet the authors and publishers who are diversifying children’s books. | Philadelphia Inquirer

• Three fantastic indie presses for queer book lovers to check out. | Book Riot

• Martine Powers examines the sudden popularity of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. | The Washington Post

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• “Myth-making is so playful and permission-giving because it’s a collective form of storytelling that doesn’t belong to just one person and refuses to be property.” K-Ming Chang on ancestors and ghost stories. | PEN America

• “I’m not sure I can pass the cowbell off as a family heirloom.” Claire-Louise Bennett considers a (possible) piece of family history. | The New Yorker

• New exhibitions are spotlighting the women behind Ulysses. | Smithsonian

• “Theory is back in the right’s vocabulary… because it serves a political purpose: it inflames public anti-intellectualism and directs the media toward ideas which are made to seem non-commonsensical, foreign, and dangerous.” Samuel Catlin on the abuses of “theory.” | Gawker

Also on Lit Hub: Five books about the perils and pitfalls of (fictional) fame • How systemic racism is downplayed and dismissed in the classroom • Read from Monique Roffey’s new novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch