Lit Hub Daily: June 18, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1982, both John Cheever and Djuna Barnes die.
- “We are all unreliable narrators, recounting our stories through the filters of perception and memory.” Matt Young considers the nuances of memoir and autofiction. | Lit Hub Craft
- Levi Vonk on Summer Brenner’s Dust and the complexities inherent to writing about the South. | Lit Hub Criticism
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Ananda Lima considers pre-publication anxiety and the virtues of crafting: “I had to let go of my fear or embarrassment. Make mistakes, have things look a little wonky. Laugh at myself.” | Lit Hub Art
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Rachel Cusk, Francine Prose, Thom Gunn, and more! These new books are out today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Alex DiFrancesco on searching for spirituality alongside transness. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “Minty and Elizabeth were not alone in their desperate appeal to an unseen presence for emotional comfort.” How a young Harriet Tubman found solstice in religion. | Lit Hub Biography
- Priyanka Mattoo on the complexities of growing up in a multicultural family (and being a multilingual person). | Lit Hub Memoir
- “The hall and the stairs, the front room and the kitchen and even the walk-in cupboard of the flat were covered in framed posters, newspaper stories and flyers for past political events.” Read from Andrew O’Hagan’s novel, Caledonian Road. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “One thing readers tend to know about Vladimir Sorokin’s 1999 Russian novel Blue Lard is that a pro-Putin youth group in 2002 set up a big papier-mâché toilet in front of the Bolshoi Theatre to protest the book by throwing it into the tank.” On two new translations of Sorokin. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Yasmin El-Rifae talks to Ratik Asokan about Gaza, Egypt, and the state of journalism. | New York Review of Books
- “This is pretty good, but not that good.” A meditation on downtown scammers and New York restaurants. | n+1
- Julia Carpenter explores the necessity and difficulty of accessing books in prison. | Esquire
- “As later became true of my life, my mother had many friends, but no family. She had a surfeit of love but a scarcity of protection, which mirrored what she offered me. In sum, I was often alone.” Kathleen Alcott on violence, horror, and femininity. | The Paris Review
- Why are legacy fashion houses leaning into literature? It’s all about the aesthetic. | Vogue Business
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