Lit Hub Daily: March 10, 2022

TODAY: In 1969, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is published by G.P. Putnam Son’s.  

• “This reader may mistake the moment the author smelled her shoulder for a kind of power. But that is because she has misread his work.” Read “Best American Male,” an essay by Rebecca Hazelton. | Lit Hub

• What does it actually look like to decenter whiteness in fiction? Kasim Ali describes what it looked in writing Good Intentions. | Lit Hub Craft

• Kelly Weill on the importance of paying attention to Flat Earthers. | Lit Hub

• “I started to realize that the desert was like a mass grave for migrants on their way to a better life.” Ousman Umar on surviving a journey across the Sahara as a boy. | Lit Hub Memoir

• David George Haskell decodes birdsong and elk calls. | Lit Hub Nature

• Romance novels and furious phone calls: Liz Scheier recounts the unglamorous life of an editorial assistant with family troubles. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Liam McIlvanney gives a brief tour of Glasgow through history. | CrimeReads

• “It’s not a question of if there will be more pain but when.” Chloe Benjamin on migraines and ambition. | The Cut

• Adrienne Westenfeld considers the migration of novelists to Substack. | Esquire

• “War is unimaginable until our fingers touch its scorched stones. Until our eyes see its lightning.” Agata Izabela Brewer on loss and exile in poetry. | Guernica 

• Why Seven Pillars of Wisdom—T.E. Lawrence’s memoir of the 1916-1918 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire on which Lawrence of Arabia was based—is a necessary read right now. | Washington Post

• These books tell us more about Ukraine’s history and culture. | The Economist 

• Yuliya Musakovska, Volodymyr Dibrova, and others weigh in with dispatches from Ukraine. | AGNI

• “She’s an assemblage of Nazi documents, a set of symptoms in a reparations claim, one name on the postwar lists of survivors and displaced persons. Who can make a person from such traces?” Mireille Juchau pursues the story of one woman in the Holocaust. | HEAT

Also on Lit Hub: Sejal Shah remembers beloved writer and editor Valerie Boyd • Corinne Hoex considers the power of the unconscious • Read from Lee Kravetz’s debut novel, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.

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