Lit Hub Daily: July 5, 2022

• “When we compare them, we often disregard a simple fact: that we need them both.” Marianne Eloise searches for Joan Didion and Eve Babitz in literary Los Angeles. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• Lonely at a writing residency, Anuradha Roy finds “love in new languages” from the writers who stayed before her. | Lit Hub Memoir

• “Instead of blasting a trumpet, they could just laugh.” How the queens of early modern Europe used laughter to their advantage. | Lit Hub History

• Why Yara Zgheib made the (liberating) switch from memoir to fiction. | Lit Hub

• What happens to democracy when social media giants have the power to “rank, sort and order the ideas of others”? | Lit Hub Tech

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• Rebecca Rukeyser on the best masturbation scenes in fiction. | Electric Lit

• “BookTok is not dominated by the usual power players in the book world such as authors and publishers but by regular readers.” Elizabeth A. Harris on the ongoing influence of BookTok. | The New York Times

• Elif Batuman talks to Najwa Jamal about the state of contemporary fiction. | The Nation

• “Procrastinating strangely returns my energy to me.” Brontez Purnell on bed, boyfriends, and betrayal. | Interview

• Mary Norris considers the film Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, which provides a rare window in the relationship between writer and editor. | The New Yorker

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• “I suddenly enter a community. It envelops me, advises me, speaks to me, jokes with me, opposes me.” Adel Tincelin writes about their relationship to gender and three years of transition (tr. Evan McGorray). | Words Without Borders

• Richard Fisher goes inside the Future Library, which stores manuscripts that will not be published until 2113. | BBC

Also on Lit Hub: 1980s glam French rebellion: A literary playlist • A poem by Zeina Hashem Beck from her new collection, O • Read a story from Meng Jin’s new collection, Self-Portrait with Ghost