Lit Hub Daily: July 21, 2022

TODAY: In 1933, John Gardner, best known for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster’s point of view, is born.   

• How to win friends and influence people: Start with Paul Hollywood’s Ultimate Focaccia. | Lit Hub Food

• Considering Ursula K. Le Guin’s “liberatory alternative” to car culture. | Lit Hub

• Alanna Schubach on balancing the uncanny with the familiar—because even Long Island can be creepy. | Lit Hub Craft

• Sarah McCraw Crow recommends 10 midlife coming-of-age novels. | Lit Hub

• “If you type the words ‘Great Film Directors’ into Google, you have to scroll past 45 portraits of male filmmakers before you read the first woman.” David Jenkins spotlights eight women directors from around the world you should be watching. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Christian Lorentzen on Christopher Hitchens’ A Hitch in Time, Michael Ian Black on Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• The best crime novels of 2022 (so far). | CrimeReads

• Quidditch organizations rebrand the sport as “Quadball” in an attempt to distance themselves from J.K. Rowling. | The New York Times

• “I think that my knowledge of the Native American oral tradition leads me in the direction of poetry because it is poetic.” N. Scott Momaday on formal verse, falling in love with Emily Dickinson, and bears. | The Millions

• Are these the 50 “most tearjerking, hilarious, satisfying, and shocking death scenes in 2,500 years of culture”? | Slate 

• “All the fun and frustration of reading Human Blues makes me wish, as I often do, for more novels full of feminine swagger.” Lily Meyer considers Elisa Albert and the art of literary swag. | Gawker

• Richard Hughes Gibson goes deep on the paragraph’s “curious history as a punctuation mark and unit of thought.” | The Hedgehog Review

• Brian Attebery’s favorite fantasy novels from the 21st century. | The Guardian

• The Vinton Public Library in Iowa has temporarily closed after “a series of departures over LGBTQ+ book bans left it short-staffed.” | The Hill

Also on Lit Hub: A love letter to public libraries • How Madame Mao remade Hollywood for Chinese audiences • Read from Brad Zellar’s latest novel, Till the Wheels Fall Off

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