Lit Hub Daily: June 10, 2022

TODAY: In 1915, Saul Bellow is born.  

• Edafe Okporo reflects on life as a gay ex-priest in Nigeria. | Lit Hub Religion

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• “Glory Hallelujah!! A delicious poke in the snoot for Hitler.” Read excerpts from Mary Churchill’s World War II diary. | Lit Hub History

• When the smoke cleared in Hell Creek, Montana, exposing a “child’s conception of a monster”—aka the first T. Rex fossil. | Lit Hub Paleontology

• “Writing a novel is such a big How—a Voltron, really, of many little Hows.” After going from scripts to books, Carter Bays has some advice. | Lit Hub Craft

• A hotbed of countercultural ideas: Joanna Scutts on the early days of the the Heterodoxy Women’s Club. | Lit Hub History

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• Anthony Almojera recalls becoming a “one-man EMS publicity department” in March 2020, as the overwhelmed New York City health system looked poised for collapse. | Lit Hub Life in a Pandemic

• “Language is not merely a tool of communication, but also a place where reality can be shaped.” Toward a definition of Indigenous futurism. | Lit Hub

• Leila Mottley’s Nightcrawling, Tom Perrotta’s Tracy Flick Can’t Win, and Andrew Holleran’s Kingdom of Sand all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Queer mysteries and thrillers to read all year long. | CrimeReads

• “In 2021, the most challenged books included Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, and All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson.

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• All feature LGBTQ content.” Experts answer the FAQs of book banning. | The Washington Post

• Ahead of Bloomsday, step inside Ulysses Rare Books, the antiquarian bookshop near Davy Byrne’s pub (IYKYK). | Financial Times

• Playwright Lynn Nottage shares the books that changed her life. | Vogue

• A new exhibition shows the ways that children’s books captured the civil rights movement. | The New York Times

• “To read the works of Gerald Murnane is to feel a nearly inexpressible sensation of expansion.” Robert Rubsam on Last Letter to a Reader. | The Baffler

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• Heather Schwedel investigates the latest titling trend in women’s fiction: the “protagonist does a thing” formula. | Slate

• A look at the oldest cookbooks from libraries around the world. | Atlas Obscur

Also on Lit Hub: The final journals of Antigone Kefala, one of Australia’s most significant writers • Tom Perrotta on how to keep a story’s momentum going • Read from Ida Jessen’s newly translated book, A Postcard for Annie (tr. Martin Aitken)

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