Lit Hub Daily: July 28, 2023

• “A small, vengeful man.” Masha Gessen chronicles how Vladimir Putin began his iron-fisted reign in Russia. | Lit Hub Politics

• A friendship for the ages: On the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, two believers in American exceptionalism. | Lit Hub History

• Now that we’ve all seen Barbenheimer, here’s the Literary Film And TV You Need to Stream in August. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• The Best Audiobooks of July for your listening pleasure. | Lit Hub

• Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto, Patrick deWitt’s The Librarianist, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate all feature among July’s Best Reviewed Fiction. | Book Marks

• Kate Zambreno’s The Light Room, Beth Nguyen’s Owner of a Lonely Heart, and John McPhee’s Tabula Rasa all feature among July’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction. | Book Marks

• “He would be forever in the same room with me, but six feet apart. It was just as well that his life now seemed perfectly self-contained, finally stabilized. He had no room for me in it.” A new story by Emily Zhou. | Curran

• Molly Templeton wonders: What do we want from the bookish internet? | Tor

• “My locs soak up water and sun like a plant. They laugh at me, speak to me, and grow with me.” In the new issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Lirit Gilmore writes about hair and stories. | Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

• Take a look (out)side Bart’s Books, Ojai’s iconic outdoor bookstore. | LA Times

• Peter Schurmal Wallace considers the connection between Peter Handke’s writing and his politics. | The Nation

Also on Lit Hub: 23 books out in paperback this August • Yael Goldstein-Love on weaving science into fiction • Read from Alexis M. Smith’s reissued debut novel, Glaciers