Lit Hub Daily: June 16, 2021

TODAY: In 1816 at the Villa Diodati, Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his house guests—Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori—and challenges each to write a ghost story, which culminates in Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein (read more about it here).  

• How Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 balloon hoax, splashed across the front page of the New York Sun, launched a “powerful if chaotic machine of publicity, doubt, and belief.” | Lit Hub History

• “And as I love you I love your work and as you are me your work is mine. I could not have you maul that about and mess it up.” On Martha Gellhorn’s love letters to Ernest Hemingway. | Lit Hub

• Neal Allen (or Mr. Anne Lamott) reflects on envy, self-publishing, and the perks of being the second-most famous writer in your marriage. | Lit Hub

• “You can’t write fiction if you’re not compulsive. Ninety percent of what I write gets thrown out.” Joshua Henkin talks to Ellen Adams about his new novel, Morningside Heights. | Lit Hub

• Benjamin Hedin considers The Lives of Girls and Women, the genre-curious book that “tells us how Alice Munro became Alice Munro.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• “Recognizing the stubborn duration of police abuse and violence is less about pessimism than it is about sobriety.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor looks to the future of Black activist social movements. | Lit Hub Politics

• P.J. Vernon on bad gays in good books and “the affirming power of queer genre fiction.” | CrimeReads

• True Grit, The Fire Next Time, The Velveteen Rabbit, and more rapid-fire book recs from Aimee Bender. | Book Marks

• “A new Federal Writers’ Project could employ creatives and harness their energy to build civic dialogue.” On the possibilities of investing in arts infrastructure. | The New Republic

• Alex McElroy considers swimming in strangers’ pools and their relationship with their father. | Harper’s Bazaar

• Can the high school debate culture Ben Lerner describes in The Topeka School explain what’s wrong with Josh Hawley? | Electric Literature

• “Ellison believed the field of culture was a place of limitless freedom, where the artist, writer, poet and musician could express the fullness and complexity of Black life.” Nicole Rudick looks at the influence of Invisible Man on visual artists, 70 years on. | T Magazine

• Why Amanda Montell wants people to consider “that to some degree, we’re all under cultish influence.” | BookPage

• Listen to this podcast with Maggie Smith, interviewed by Hanif Abdurraqib. | WOSU

• Haley Mlotek asks, “What is it about Joan Didion that seduces and then betrays?” | The Nation

• Take a look at Portland’s only Black-owned bookstore, Third Eye Books. | Oregon Live

Also on Lit Hub: How the Stepe brothers inspired a punk rock revolution in Illinois • John Branch on personal loss and public grief in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting • Read from Yan Lianke’s newly translated novel, Hard Like Water 

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