Lit Hub Daily: June 13, 2023

• While visiting Italy’s vanishing towns, Dominic Smith muses on abandonment both physical and emotional. | Lit Hub Memoir

• 26 new books out today for your summer reading glow-up. | The Hub

• “When we write ‘I’ in the personal essay it is a philosophical act as much as it is a creative one.” Sarah Viren on essayistic visions of the self. | Lit Hub Criticism

• This month’s Lit Hub Asks: 5 Writers, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers features Javier Fuentes, Derek Owusu, Helen Schulman, Keziah Weir, and Jenny Xie. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

• On the care and feeding of owls—or, why Harry Potter’s Hedwig would make a terrible pet. | Lit Hub Nature

• Raise a Norton cranthology to W.W. Norton’s 100th birthday. | New York Times

• Anne Thériault on Sylvia Plath and journaling for mental health. | The Walrus

• “If there’s one thing in the world I never want to be again and wish I never had to be in the first place, it’s a teenage swot with PE in the morning.” On the dangers of re-reading your teenage diaries. | The Guardian

• “Should we not ask ourselves if the presence of so many poems changes not only the way in which the Bible speaks to us, but also the kind of message, announcement, or call that it conveys?” Michael Edwards considers the poetry of the Bible. | The Paris Review

• Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has signed a bill preventing libraries from banning books. | NBC Chicago

• Elizabeth Gilbert has pulled her forthcoming novel from the publishing schedule after Ukrainian reviewers on Goodreads expressed “anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain” about the book’s Russian setting. | The Hub

Also on Lit Hub: Danielle Trussoni on pursuing perfection, draft after draft • A reading list of novels inspired by other art forms • Read from Richard Ford’s latest novel, Be Mine