Lit Hub Daily: June 5, 2023

TODAY: In 1944, the second line of Paul Verlaine’s 1866 poem Chanson d’automne (Blessent mon cœur d’une langueur monotone) is broadcast by the Allies over BBC Radio Londres as a coded message to the French Resistance to prepare for the D-Day landings.

• Alexander Chee recommends Natalia Ginzburg’s novella Valentino, “a story as devastating as it is hilarious.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• “It is my contention that Americans invented childhood and that now, sadly, Americans are presiding over its demise.” Todd Brewster reflects on American Childhood: A Photographic History. | Lit Hub Photography

• Why Henry James’s “novella of shadows,” The Turn of the Screw, still haunts us 125 years later. | Lit Hub

• May we interest you in June’s best sci-fi and fantasy books? | Lit Hub

• “If you want to know the future, the saying goes, look to California.” Laila Lalami considers what’s next. | The New York Times Magazine

• The good folks over at Zócalo Public Square have your summer reading needs taken care of. | Zócalo Public Square

• Salman Rushdie is planning to write a book about being stabbed onstage. | The Guardian

• “Does Comey—do any of these politicos turned authors—have anything to reveal at all?” Jacob Bacharach considers James Comey’s crime novel. | The New Republic

• Ben Libman on the life and work of C.P. Cavafy, “a Zarathustra wise enough to be right and untimely enough to be, as he remains, a rumor.” | Poetry

• Simon & Schuster UK is launching a TikTok hype house for books. | The Hub

• Helen Shaw on writer James Grissom, who published an interview with Tennessee Williams and then suddenly seemed to secure interviews with anyone in film, theater, and beyond. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub: Anna Badkhen on the joys of revision • June poetry recommendations • Read from Jenny Erpenbeck’s newly translated novel, Kairos (tr. Michael Hoffman).

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