Lit Hub Daily: June 8, 2021

• Fights with publishers, birthday cards, four drafts of The Life of the Mind: Samantha Rose Hill dwells in Hannah Arendt’s archives. | Lit Hub History

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• “Ethel’s imagined spirit infuses every fiber of what Esther Greenwood is suffering—not simply her imprisonment, but the madness of an America that incarcerated so many women in different ways during the early 1950s.” Anne Sebba on the many fictional afterlives of Ethel Rosenberg. | Lit Hub Biography

• Beach books, bar books, couch books—here are new books (out today!) for wherever your summer reading takes place. | The Hub

• What writing has meant to Quntos KunQuest, who’s been incarcerated at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola since 1996. | Lit Hub

• “No one will ever be able to say, with absolute certainty, how many Fox News devotees died from the virus.” Brian Stelter calls for a reckoning at the network that made a mockery of COVID. | Lit Hub Politics

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• ¡Hola Papi! author John Paul Brammer recommends five queer memoirs that guided his life and writing. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Master satirist or interloper? Philip D’Anieri looks back to how Bill Bryson’s 1998 bestseller, A Walk in the Woods, was received by the public and the Appalachian Trail community. | Lit Hub Nature

• This month’s 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers features Sam Apple, Will McPhail, Paul Mendez, Clare Sestanovich, and Kathy Wang. | Lit Hub

• Ethel Rohan talks to Jane Ciabarrati about unlikable characters and the beauty of Ireland. | Lit Hub

• “I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book.” Joan Didion on Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “true crime novel,” The Executioner’s Song. | Book Marks

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• From Grindr to Published Author: John Paul Brammer on his journey to publication. | Entertainment Weekly

• How Milman Parry unmasked the true identity of the writer of the Iliad and the Odyssey. (Hint: It wasn’t Homer). | The New Yorker

• Read an interview with Ashutosh Potdar and Noopur Desai, the editors of the bilingual Indian journal Hakara. | Words Without Borders

• “What would happen were we to dust off the mirror of realism once again?” Considering the subversive potential of the 19th-century novel. | The Baffler

• Take a look inside Philip Roth’s personal library, soon to be on display in his hometown of Newark. | The New York Times

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• In honor of Paul Celan’s centennial year, a selection of his poetry and meditations on his work (including a cartoon by Anne Carson). | Jewish Currents

• “I try not to be in control of the meaning of my writing, or even the themes, and try instead to obey the sound of them, the form of them.” Rivka Galchen discusses the writing of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch. | Vulture

• Judy McGuire recounts her defense of a cat colony against the forces of New York City real estate. | Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

Also on Lit Hub: Kathryn Lofton deconstructs Edith Hamilton’s Mythology for modern times • Chaney Kwak on freelance writing, boredom, and traversing the most dangerous region of the Norway coast • Read from Lisa Taddeo’s debut novel, Animal