Lit Hub Daily: May 16, 2023

• Abraham Verghese talks about writing The Covenant of Water, his memories of Kerala, humanism in medicine, and more. | Lit Hub In Conversation

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• Say hello to 24 new books out today. | The Hub

• Emma Cline recommends baths as productive procrastination, and other insights from the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

• From Hamlet to The Sound of Music, what makes meta-performances so compelling? | Lit Hub Theater

• “Women like myself, promiscuous pattern-seekers, go looking for ourselves in Augustine.” Emily Wells considers celebrity patient Augustine Gleizes, chronic illness, and the male medical gaze. | Lit Hub

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• “Everywhere you go, you are surrounded by the products of labor. Every clean sidewalk, every polished hallway, every blade of cut grass. Our world cannot function without them, and yet the laborer remains unseen and unheard.” Jamil Jan Kochai on the deterioration of the American dream. | The New Yorker

• How Cafe Yafa is keeping Palestinian literature alive. | Al-Jazeera

• Meet the moms at the center of Florida’s book banning fight. | LA Times

• “Now I am sitting here in the US, I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools.” Salman Rushdie is concerned about censorship in the West. | Scroll

• Meanwhile, in China: “Books with content suspected of breaching the national security law or other local laws are removed immediately for a review.” | The Guardian

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• Vittles is expanding to cover the London restaurant scene. | Vittles

Also on Lit Hub: Matthew Binder on making sense of an absurd world • A reading list of the dark side of Paris • Read a story from María Fernanda Ampuero’s newly translated collection, Human Sacrifices (tr. Frances Riddle)