Lit Hub Daily: July 31, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1944, writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry dies.
- Soma Mei Sheng Frazier on how Asian American fiction subverts our youth-obsessed culture by focusing on grandparents. | Lit Hub Craft
- Erin Edmison takes you inside Cecchi’s, the restaurant that opened in the former home of New York literary haunt Café Loup: “New York changes, New York moves on, New York has always loved youth, and money. Somehow I had thought that Café Loup would stick around.” | Lit Hub Food
- Keith Gandal on why reading self-help books will not help you become a better tennis player. | Lit Hub Sports
- Beloved Oakland bookstore, East Bay Booksellers, has been devastated by fire—please support them if you’re able. | GoFundMe
- If you like your covers soft, these 27 paperbacks out in August might be for you. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter, Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc., Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise all feature among July’s best reviewed books. | Book Marks
- These 17 book covers are our favorites from July. | Lit Hub Design
- “I learned of Samuel’s death two days before Christmas while standing in the doorway of my mother’s new home.” Read from Dinaw Mengestu’s novel, Someone Like Us. | Lit Hub Fiction
- On Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe: “Over the past two decades, Oyeyemi has written eight novels characterized by a similar seductive and often disquieting playfulness; sometimes they tease, and sometimes they bite.” | The Nation
- “Authorial responsibility to a real subject—living or dead—is one of art’s unresolved and probably unresolvable ethical questions.” On eulogizing as an author. | Public Books
- Predictable, yet still depressing: Hillbilly Elegy has sold more than 750,000 copies in the last two weeks. | The New York Times
- “The more one learns about the workings of natural systems, the more our everyday notions of selfhood and humanity crumble away.” Helen McDonald on the lasting power of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. | Orion
- What’s going on with the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and other once-beloved alt publications? A hint: It has to do with OnlyFans and AI. | Wired
- “The reality is that there is a right answer when it comes to the question of what I should wear.” Isabel Cristo meditates on the act of getting dressed. | The Paris Review
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