Lit Hub Daily: March 21, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1948, Halldór Laxness‘ The Atom Station sells out all copies on its first day of release.
- “Just as Marx and Engels merged the working-class struggle with the struggle for socialism, so must we knit together the economic struggles of service workers with the political task of building communism.” Why service workers are instrumental to the future. | Lit Hub Politics
- Clay Risen chronicles the geopolitical shifts and internal political climate that led to the Red Scare. | Lit Hub History
- This week on the Lit Hub Podcast: choosing the books for White Lotus and much more! | Lit Hub Radio
- Alexander Clapp explores the deeply American practice of shipping trash to the Global South. | Lit Hub Nature
- Josh Cook on why “physical reading materials are vital to resistance movements.” | Lit Hub Politics
- “Does it move the story forward? Does it belong in my journal?” Elissa Altman on the problem with revenge writing. | Lit Hub Craft
- Kristen Arnett’s Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, Clay Risen’s Red Scare, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “The chapters fragmented. The narrative design of the book mirrored my disconnected neurons.” Samina Ali recounts how writing a memoir helped her brain trauma heal. | Lit Hub Craft
- A. Kendra Greene on meeting the Devil (and everyday encounters with the strange and unusual). | Lit Hub Memoir
- “Experience came to resemble endurance cinema, maybe a work of Jacques Rivette or one of Miklós Jancsó films in which the camera keeps moving along with the actors in a series of tracking shots.” Read from Joni Murphy’s novel, Barbara. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Juan Cole looks to South African cyberpunk sci-fi for insights into the rise of the tech bro oligarchy. | The Nation
- “Shaver insisted that his tales, however outlandish they may seem, were true and grounded in firsthand experience.” Brian Tucker explores Richard Sharpe Shaver’s rock books. | The Paris Review
- “No phosphorus, no life on Earth.” Jonathan Mingle on one of the planet’s most essential minerals. | New York Review of Books
- Emilien Hofman looks at a 115-year-old religion founded by a Belgian metal worker: “This attitude has helped to maintain an aura of mystery around Antoinism.” | The Dial
- Jess McAllen interviews James Kelly about his book, Margin over Mission: When Private Equity Owns Your Hospital, and the state of American healthcare. | The Baffler
- Alex Reisner takes you inside the books Meta used to train its AI. | The Atlantic
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