Lit Hub Daily: July 31, 2023

• “It reads like the guileless confession of a simple innocent embroiled in a tangled net of ravaged and ruined lives.” For The Booker Revisited, Lucy Scholes revisits Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Universal mistranslators: On the sly language of climate change denialism weaponized by the Bush administration. | Lit Hub Climate Change

• Pankaj Mishra considers the mesmerizing present of Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals: “Chaudhuri reveals himself as a connoisseur of failure, of the dignity and nobility of artistic obscurity.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• On the complicated history of crime fiction in Tanzania. | CrimeReads

• “The second child of Nathaniel and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Julian successfully torpedoed Margret Fuller’s reputation, the damage lasting for decades.” Matthew Wills on a literary hit job of yore. | JSTOR Daily

• Julia Poole bravely reads all five of Rush Limbaugh’s Rush Revere series, “a sanitized option for teaching fragile white kids history without hurting their feelings.” | The Baffler

• “The book may be devoid of meat, but it’s by no means free of earthly indulgence.” Aimee Levitt on The Vegetarian Epicure. | Eater

• Bruce Handy writes about becoming a children’s author at 62. | New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Inside the world of bodybuilding • How exile allowed Shastri Akella to write a queer novel • Read from Victoria Kielland’s newly translated novel, My Men (tr. Damion Searls)