Lit Hub Daily: July 29, 2022

TODAY: In 1918, Mary Lee Settle, the 1978 National Book Award winner (for Blood Tie) and a founder of the annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is born.  

• “The US immigration system knows I am here. I shudder to think where my information is stored within the government apparatus and for what purpose.” Luz Aguirre on living as an undocumented American. | Lit Hub Memoir

  Article continues after advertisement
  Remove Ads

• The Literary Film and TV You Need to Stream in August, from the Sandman adaptation to Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• “After February 24, I decided that never again in my life would I write or publish any of my work in Russian.” Volodymyr Rafeenko on unlearning his mother tongue. | Lit Hub Ukraine

• Six books about animal intelligence—or, why prairie dogs deserve more hype. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Maud Newton and Ann Leary discuss troubling ancestors, genealogical sleuthing, and the ethical dilemmas of writing about family. | Lit Hub

  Article continues after advertisement
  Remove Ads

• Books as art objects: Tammy Nguyen on creating a series of interrelated artist books, Four Ways Through a Cave. | Lit Hub Design

• Charles Baxter on inventorying (and delighting in) small details. | Lit Hub Craft

• Five of the best unexpected crime films of all time. | CrimeReads

• Emma Goldberg on the future of correspondence: “There’s so much to glean from a letter’s style. The ebullience of a run-on sentence and the mischief of an exclamation point.” | Astra Magazine

• Francesca Peacock considers Natalia Ginzburg’s “fierce commitment to emancipatory politics.” | Verso Blog

  Article continues after advertisement
  Remove Ads

• “The great congregations of Hardwick sentences are elegies for the people who, try as they might, can’t see their cruelty.” Greg Gerke reads The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick. | The Baffler

• Emma Straub, Hernan Diaz, and more writers share their philosophies of bookshelf organization. | The Washington Post

• Vivan Gornick on Greenwich Village’s Heterodoxy Club and American feminism: “Almost every issue of the day engaged the interest of Heterodoxy women: besides suffrage, that included Freudian analysis, labor reform, birth control, and the freedom to speak and write one’s mind.” | NYRB

• Tasha Tsiaperas on the long history of Half Price Books, which is celebrating 50 years of bookselling. | Axios

Also on Lit Hub: On Network’s Diana and the tropes that betray women • What booksellers are reading at Third Place Books • Read a short story by Virginia Woolf, from Haunted Tales: Classic Stories of Ghosts and the Supernatural 

---