Lit Hub Daily: July 26, 2021

• “Is this the actual White Soup mentioned in Pride and Prejudice? Have we found the ‘Receipt’ for ‘some excellent orange Wine’ that Jane requested just months before her death?” Searching for clues to Jane Austen’s domestic life through her BFF’s cookbook. | Lit Hub

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• Eric Dean Wilson considers how Americans’ ideas about comfort are costing everyone the planet. | Lit Hub Climate Change

• Volunteer No. 11: On Molly Williams and the long history of firefighting as indentured servitude. | Lit Hub History

• Alix Ohlin searches for new “narrative architectures” by visually mapping the stories of Alice Munro, Ocean Vuong, and more. | Lit Hub Craft

• “Oh, to be Beatrice. To always know all there is to know and be guided by it.” Mary Jo Bang on the real star of Dante’s Divine Comedy. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• Rebecca, Bluets, Wide Sargasso Sea, and more rapid-fire book recs from Emily Beyda. | Book Marks

• Richard Leider on growing into yourself with age · Kiese Laymon talks to Robert Jones, Jr.  | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

• “We are being forced to confront fundamental mysteries of humanity as technical issues.” Stephen Marche on the “ethical quagmire” of AI. | The New Yorker

• On the sobering history of California’s white supremacist vigilante tradition. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Katia Grubisic considers the failures of literary translation. | The Walrus

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• Muriel Leung considers the big and small influences that shaped her new book. | Poetry Northwest

• Katie Kitamura recommends eight summer reading books. | Jezebel

• “I’m not a writer who can set a certain time every single day when I’m going to sit down and write ten pages.” Kendra Allen on procrastination, revision, and repeated themes in her work. | The Paris Review

• “That was kind of nerve-wracking.” Authors talk about publishing books in the middle of a pandemic. | NPR

• Mariela Santos Muñiz reveals the fastest-selling books in US publishing history. | Book Riot

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Also on Lit Hub: Leigh Montville brings New Journalism to cover the 1969 NBA Finals • Akash Kapur traces the fault lines beneath Auroville • Read a story from A Place Like Home