Lit Hub Daily: July 19, 2022

• “Barbarism lurks around the corner in fantastic fiction of this era, threatening to pull humanity down the evolutionary ladder.” Silvia Moreno-Garcia on H.G. Wells, creation gone awry, and the long history of eugenics. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• How literature influenced ideas about love in the 18th century—or, how Jane Austen warned women about rakes. | Lit Hub History

• Goodbye to all that (in Los Angeles): Liska Jacobs on leaving the “city of impermanence.” | Lit Hub Memoir

• More limes, please: the surprising origin story of the gimlet. | Lit Hub History

• How a colicky baby led to Christina Geist’s picture book debut. | Lit Hub

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• Sarah Maria Griffin on literature that leans into video games as storytelling devices. | The Guardian

• “However endangered he might appear now, the Austen Bro has existed for as long as Austen has.” Ted Scheinman on what the Austen Bro knows. | GQ

• “The real stakes in this lawsuit concern not digital piracy but the preservation of library rights.” Maria Bustillos delves into book publishers’ attack on the Internet Archive. | The Nation

• Jenny Bhatt talks about her path to translating Gujarati, which “would never have happened if I hadn’t inherited my mother’s personal library.” | LARB

• Mira Jacob enumerates the joys of being in one’s “goddamn brilliant” forties. | Harper’s Bazaar

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• “This country is a terrible country, and this country is not.” David Treuer on the distance between the Americas of his Native mother and his Austrian immigrant father. | The New York Times Magazine

Also on Lit Hub: In praise of Josephine Johnson’s 1934 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel • On fan-nonfiction and the joy of mutual delusion • Read a story from Jem Calder’s new collection, Reward System