Lit Hub Daily: July 7, 2021

TODAY: In 1907, science fiction writer Robert Heinlein is born.  

• “I am painfully aware of every single thing that I need from music, embarrassed by what I ask of it.” Jessica Hopper on rock, rapture, and what artists do that mortals cannot. | Lit Hub Music

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• Julia Baird on honoring the “dull, repetitive, unglamorous work” that comprises the middle years of activist movements. | Lit Hub Politics

• “I still remember how cool it was spotting John Ashbery at Café Loup before I’d fully moved to town. I was a tourist, so I just stared.” Paul Legault on NYC’s families of choice and the collage art of John Ashbery. | Lit Hub Art

• Chris Stuck recommends six “unlinked” story collections, those supposedly “unsellable beasts.” | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “I’ve only ever known a kind of love that is toughening.” Elina Zhang on growing up the child of Chinese immigrants and reading Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Maturing, disillusionment, revelation: David Chrisinger considers the types of stories particularly useful for trauma survivors. | Lit Hub Craft

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• Tim Parks follows in the footsteps of the garibaldini, 4,000 desperate troops who fled the Siege of Rome in 1849. | Lit Hub History

• Scott Borchert calls for a new Federal Writers’ Project. | The New York Times

• Laraine Herring reflects on a difficult battle with cancer and how it impacted her writing. | Entropy

• “We were all locked down and I realized that the experience that I had gone through on the cruise ship was a good parallel to what we were all collectively experiencing.” Chaney Kwak explains how a cruise ship nightmare became a memoir. | NPR Morning Edition

• What’s the purpose of a book blurb? Tom Beer briefly unpacks the latest discourse. | Kirkus

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• “Words resonate differently from one country, one collective, one people, to the next.” Mark Polizzotti dissects the many complications of translation. | The MIT Press Reader

• Emily Yoon Perez, Kristina Huang, and others analyze the role of anti-racism in the academy. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• “Perhaps after a year of being too online, Bimboism is the antidote.” Marlowe Granados on the new era of the bimbo. | The Baffler

Also on Lit Hub: Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta on the pleasures of writing supremely rich characters • A poem by Kevin Simmonds • Read from Pajtim Statovci’s newly translated novel, Bolla (tr. David Hackston) 

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