Lit Hub Daily: July 23, 2019
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1896, Marnie Dickens, seen here with dad Charles and sister Kate, dies. She wrote a book of reminiscences about her father, and with her aunt, Georgina Hogarth, edited the first collection of his letters.
- Behind the myths of Scott and Zelda’s epic romance: Eleanor Lanahan on her grandparents’ love letters. | Lit Hub
- Some free summer reading advice: cultivate an obsession with Mary McCarthy’s “grimly truthful and strangely modern” The Group. | Lit Hub
- Andy Sweet’s iconic photography documents the vanishing elderly Jewish communities of South Beach. | Lit Hub
- Rick Moody, life coach, returns to tackle questions of body image and self-loathing (with a little help from Lidia Yuknavitch). | Lit Hub
- “Poets embrace nuance. Lawyers seek to crush it.” Elizabeth Bales Frank on the pleasures and perils of life as a law firm’s poet laureate. | Lit Hub
- Telling the Finnish-American immigrant story: Karl Marlantes on the lumberjacking lives of his ancestors. | Lit Hub
- Christopher Benfey, the author of If: The Unfold Story of Kipling’s American Years, recommends five books from Rudyard Kipling’s New England. | Book Marks
- “I feel such a sense of loss when I think of the great, unwritten poems that took a backseat to polished floors.” On the biggest threat to creative women: a structural lack of uninterrupted alone time. | The Guardian
- Jill Lepore on the domestic life and literary legacy of Herman Melville, who “wrote most of Moby-Dick on land, in a valley, on a farm, in a house a-dither with his wife, his sisters, and his mother, a family man’s Walden.” | The New Yorker
- “Fiction 101 teaches a writer to reveal character through action, and a story producer on The Bachelorette has no option but to do anything else.” A reality TV producer and novelist on The Bachelorette-as-MFA. | Vanity Fair
- Read a lost 1933 essay by Langston Hughes, never before published in English. | Smithsonian
- “There’s an intellectual arrogance about someone who has decided that non-literary fiction is boring and blank”: Irish author Colm Tóibín is under fire for dismissing genre fiction (and the Golden Age of television!). | The Irish Times
- A group of House Republicans wants Amazon to reverse its ban on selling gay conversion therapy books. | Vice
- Pablo Picasso was a prolific writer in the latter half of his life. A recent traveling exhibition explored the influence of Chinese art and writing styles on Picasso’s poetry. | The Telegraph
Also on Lit Hub: On the uncomfortable contradictions of “Amazing Grace,” which was written by a slave trader • A poem by Jana Prikryl from her collection No Matter • Read an excerpt from Natalia Ginzburg’s novel Happiness, as Such (tr. Minna Zallman Proctor).
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