Lit Hub Daily: June 7, 2022

TODAY: In 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, is born.  

• Part two of Lit Hub’s Summer Preview: 9 great short story collections to dip into while you’re sitting in the sunshine. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “This is what I believe about Jane Austen: She would have appreciated a good sex party.” Taylor Hahn wonders what a modern-day Austen novel would look like. | Lit Hub

• Take a book break with these 21 new titles out today. | The Hub

• Keith Gessen explores the often-disturbing biographies of great children’s book authors, from Eric Carle to the secretive author of the Frances books. | Lit Hub

• How Tété-Michel’s apolitical travelogue, An African in Greenland, challenges the Western world’s “cloud of whiteness.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• “In a perversion of all laws of the universe, I’m about to read my father a story before bedtime.” Séamas O’Reilly on reading his memoir to the man who taught him to love books (and skipping over the hardest bits). | Lit Hub Memoir

• The great riddle of the living body: What the Ancient Greeks thought they understood about blood. | Lit Hub History

• Reyna Grande on reconciling her children’s “childhood of abundance” with her own childhood as an undocumented Mexican immigrant. | Lit Hub Memoir

• What are the most influential queer books of all time? | Book Riot

• Claire Woodcock takes a close look at a book-banning policy in one Florida school district. | VICE

• Becca Rothfeld makes the case against encouraging writers to talk. | Gawker

• “To find the creative spark in a difficult moment can be extraordinarily liberating.” Adam Dalva on Body Work and the necessity of writing about trauma. | The Atlantic

• What’s up with all the Chekhov revivals these days? | Los Angeles Times

• “I was a chronic runner, routinely threatening to leave home.” Janyce Stefan-Cole on home, from the new issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. | DPA

• The books Bill Gates thinks you should be reading this summer. | The Hub

Also on Lit Hub: Albert Serra’s Pacifiction is deeply unsettling—and deeply literary. • Why all fiction is climate fiction now • Read from Andrew Holleran’s latest novel, The Kingdom of Sand

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