Lit Hub Daily: March 24, 2021

• “By relearning his grandmother’s old style of storytelling, Márquez began telling a story unlike any before.” Angus Fletcher on what Gabriel García Márquez understood about rediscovery. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• Are climate change novels a form of activism? Seven novelists weigh in, including Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Madeleine Watts, and Lydia Millet. | Lit Hub Climate Change

• “I mean, if I wanted to write a novel, couldn’t I just have used my imagination?” Amity Gaige on the disastrous sailing trip she (barely) survived, all in the name of research. | Lit Hub

• Jennifer Keishin Armstrong considers a forgotten chapter in the story of TV: “There was a time—a time before, even, Lucille Ball—when women ran television.” | Lit Hub History

• “One of the most important aspects of teaching literature is to get students comfortable with being uncertain.” How English teacher Keith Leonard counters students’ COVID anxieties. | Lit Hub Teaching

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• Craig Taylor recommends five books that expand our idea of oral histories, featuring collective voices from the USSR, the world of Edie Sedgwick, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Keith Roysdon with a brief history of Hitchcock Presents, the weird, wild show that once dominated the airwaves. | CrimeReads

• White Noise, Austerlitz, The Catcher in the Rye, and more rapid-fire book recs from Mark O’Connell. | Book Marks

• “[It] captures some of the weird Gothic horror that white people have come, by way of their new digital Calvinism, to accept as being inherent to digital life.” Brandon Taylor considers the Internet Novel. | Sweater Weather

• Can a reading diet mitigate the effects of “content creep”? | Zora

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• “We never talked explicitly about race when I was younger, even though I was usually the only Asian kid in every room.” Nicole Chung on being adopted by a white family and being Asian American in America. | Time

• Polish screenwriter Jakub Żulczyk is facing charges for calling the country’s president a “moron.” | The Guardian 

• “None of today’s ‘girl singers’ have crafted as sophisticated a drag as Dolly.” Tressie McMillan Cottom on the “Daughters of Dolly” and the subversiveness of drag. | Essaying

• “That’s what’s so endlessly fascinating about Hemingway, is that in the Whitmanesque sense, he contained multitudes.” Ken Burns on Ernest Hemingway and his new PBS docuseries. | Jacobin

• “What does it say that it is so much easier for my son to find wonderfully crafted television shows and films featuring talking animals than it is to find shows about kids who look like him?” Hope Wabuke on Disney’s Black characters. | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Also on Lit Hub: Melanie Challenger considers the desire to be done with bodies • David Thomson on why Alfred Hitchcock’s films still feel dangerous • Read from Jessie Van Eerden’s latest novel, Call It Horses