Lit Hub Daily: July 18, 2022

• What are dads bringing to the table (in literature)? Janet Manley considers The Great Man Theory, Raising Raffi, and dad-as-author. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• “Could moles boring blind into the earth have succeeded where ­humans had failed, turning up fragments of the lost city?” Searching for a vanished medieval city somewhere in Wales. | Lit Hub History

• Big daddy: Taymour Soomro recommends six books about patriarchs. | Lit Hub

• “Every insurgency requires a political body to represent their views.” Malcolm Nance on the insurgents backed by the Republican party. | Lit Hub Politics

• The conservative book ban movement is using social media to harass teachers who stand up to them. | MIT Technology Review

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• “Did Pessoa truly control his alter egos? Or did his creations, in fact, control him?” Ilan Stevens on the many personae of Fernando Pessoa. | The Nation

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett on Hemingway’s “Hill Like White Elephants” and why we need nuanced abortion stories. | The Guardian

• Shirley Li considers how the film adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing “obfuscates the questionable morality at the novel’s center.” | The Atlantic

• Susie Steiner—British crime thriller author and the person responsible for the popularity of those “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters—has died at 51. | The Washington Post

• “Kenward Elmslie has now gone off into the far air, but he has left riches behind.” W. C. Bamberger remembers Kenward Elmslie. | Rain Taxi

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• Victoria Rein talks to the owners of Porter Square Books about the upcoming relaunch of their writers-in-residence program. | Cambridge Day

Also on Lit Hub: Courtney Maum on making a writing career • 10 books where small changes add up to a big payoff • Read from William Gay’s new story collection, Stories from the Attic