Lit Hub Daily: July 18, 2023

• “Once I can’t rely on sight to write anymore, will I, like Borges, no longer be quite sure who is writing this page?” Andrew Leland on Jorge Luis Borges’ blindness and his own. | Lit Hub Memoir

• It’s a banger week for new books, starting with a new Whitehead. | The Hub

• Alfred J. Naddaff spends 72 hours in Zurich with Khaled Khalifa, chronicler of modern Syria: “One wish has remained the most salient: his desire to return home, which he describes to me as a sort of sickness.” | Lit Hub Politics

• A miraculous display of puffins on the Skellig Islands. | Lit Hub Nature

• Considering the life and work of Charles Causley, one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Rebecca Ackermann considers the rise of “tech worker fiction.” | Esquire

• “Zilahy can murder a sacred cow and canonize an unknown victim of totalitarianism in a single sentence.” Marina Abramović on Péter Zilahy. | The Paris Review

• Take a peek at the writing spaces of Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, and more. | The New York Times

• Stassa Edwards on Lewis Carroll and “the confluence between the literary Alice and the Alice who stood before Carroll’s camera.” | Lapham’s Quarterly

• Jeet Heer looks at the history of Young Americans for Freedom, “a lawsuit-happy right-wing student group that has been a shaping force on the right for more than six decades.” | The Nations

• “When the shit went down, it was me and my Barbies against the world.” Aisling Walsh on what Barbie gave her as a queer, autistic kid. | Jezebel

Also on Lit Hub: Cristina Garcia on chronicling Cuba’s complex history • How embracing destruction can make our writing better • Read a story from Kathleen Alcott’s debut collection, Emergency