Lit Hub Daily: July 31, 2018

• A history of violence: Paula Saunders examines the parallel lines of history and home. | Lit Hub
• Breaking up the boys club: On women in the rare book trade. | Lit Hub
• Modernity, masculinity, maturity: Joseph O’Neill’s Good Trouble are stories for dark times. | Lit Hub
• The Lit Hub staff’s favorite stories from July. | Lit Hub
• “I was a new immigrant, eager to shine, and if self-abuse were to be omitted from the reckoning, pure of body and heart.” An excerpt from Amitava Kumar’s new novel, Immigrant, Montana. | Lit Hub
• From The Devil in the White City to E.L. Doctorow’s novel World’s Fair, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney author Dawn Raffel on her favorite carnivalesque classics. | Book Marks
• How the disruptions of World War I gave rise to the careful rules of golden-era, traditional mysteries. | CrimeReads
• “Most of the books are self-published. They are sold online, at gun shows or person to person.” On the underground literature of white supremacists. | The New York Times
• On Dr. Seuss’s forgotten Cold War allegory The Butter Battle Book, which ends with “an ambiguous blank white page that could be interpreted as the end of all life.” | The Outline
• “It’s a divided, demented little book, riven by dueling desires for penance and self-promotion—as confused, perhaps, as Leo himself.” Emily Harnett on the literary legacy of nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, who helped create the atomic bomb, and who tried to stop it. | Hazlitt
• How Argentine writer Jorge Barón Biza turned familial violence and tragedy into fiction. | The New Yorker
• “If studying medicine is good training for literature, could studying literature also be good training for medicine?” The writing exercise that could make doctors better at their jobs. | The Atlantic
• “I’ve joked with friends that I might put my Ouija board on it and see what happens.” Buying Sylvia Plath’s table at auction. | Harriet
• “They’re the healthiest corpses on the block, Ginny thinks, and then she sits back down to work.” Short fiction by Kristen Arnett. | Guernica

Also on Lit Hub: Charlotte Strick on how Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy got those iconic covers • Good boys: the indisputably best dogs in (contemporary) literature • Stories from Zachary Mason’s Metamorphica