Lit Hub Daily: March 13, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1891, Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts opens in London for a single private performance.
- “Folktales are powerful because they are how many of us first experience stories.” Gina Chung on drawing inspiration from Korean folktales. | Lit Hub Criticism
- On the clear and present danger of far-right extremism in America: “Irony of ironies, the people who took me the most seriously were those same dead-enders, and I certainly wasn’t changing any of their minds.” | Lit Hub Politics
- What does it mean to invite surprise into your writing? Barrie Jean Borich explores the art of bafflement. | Lit Hub Craft
- Emily Raboteau considers the intersections of climate change and gentrification on human and non-human habitats. | Lit Hub Photography
- “The truth is, the majority of biographies are written by men, about men, for men.” Katie Gee Salisbury examines Anna May Wong’s life and cinematic career through the eyes of a woman. | Lit Hub Biography
- On the forgotten women writers of the Renaissance: “Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford were among a small but not insignificant group of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who did what Woolf deemed impossible…” | Lit Hub History
- “The Palm Aire is, it turns out, a golf clubhouse and when we arrive (almost an hour late) there is a bagpiper piping outside, with all the paraphernalia: kilt, sporran, socks, aslant balmoral hat.” Rudi Zygadlo searches for Robert Burns in the most unexpected of places: Sarasota, Florida. | Lit Hub Travel
- “Once you smell how brilliant he was, you feel it’s legitimate to show the roiling squalor of his demise.” Dan Sheehan interviews Tom Hollander on playing Truman Capote. | Lit Hub TV
- “She hadn’t cried. She vomited after it was clear that the red-truck kid was not going to come back to life.” Read from Rita Bullwinkel’s new novel, Headshot. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “When you get a story from your ancestors, it’s usually been translated. Not literally, from language to language—it’s been passed down to people, like a game of telephone.” Katya Apekina talks writing and intergenerational trauma. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- On the political concept of the underground: “Subterranean spaces offered up especially powerful resources for 19th-century Black authors, who made use of undergrounds to ‘imagine Black life within unfreedom.’” | Public Books
- Posthumous publishing is a complex (and ethically dubious) affair. Is it always a betrayal? What happens when it isn’t? | Esquire
- “Sometimes we can be nostalgic for things that never happened.” Victoria Chan on the bittersweetness of nostalgia and the act of yearning. | The Walrus
- Remembering and mourning Alexey Navalny: “Yet no other figure in the liberal opposition has managed to inspire hope quite as powerfully as Navalny.” | New York Review of Books
- Authors are suing Nvidia over AI training data. What could this mean for the future of literature and copyright law? | Ars Technica
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