Lit Hub Daily: May 16, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1929, Adrienne Rich is born.
- “She wrote for everyone who has let the sharp edge of regret dull into a daily ache, who has been surprised by love, by need, by the desire for more.” Jonny Diamond on seeing his mother in Alice Munro. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Are you the asshole if you want twelve blurbs on your book? Kristen Arnett answers your awkward questions about bad bookish behavior. | Lit Hub Craft
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Elias Canetti considers the many guises of death and “what remains alive of the dead and is dispersed among others.” | Lit Hub History
Article continues after advertisement - What happens when you adopt a constitutional lifestyle? You might end up parading around Manhattan with a musket. | Lit Hub Politics
- Jordan Landsman on translating the forgotten Argentine writer Ángel Bonomini: “Even if my translation were to somehow succeed in making Bonomini a household name, “secret master” would still be a fitting title for him.” | Lit Hub On Translation
- “Ms. Munro has created tales that limn entire lifetimes in a handful of pages.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Carolyn Kubler recommends small town fiction by Kathryn Davis, Linda Legarde Grover, Jon McGregor, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “Men and women were equally likely to linger over photographs of cute babies, and equally likely to expend effort to do so.” Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on the biological and neurological impulses that fuel parent-child bonds. | Lit Hub Science
- “Morbidly obese. That’s what the nurse just typed into my chart. She is a wafer of a woman.” Read from Renée Watson’s new novel, skin & bones. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “For nearly a century, the oil and gas industry has been obsessed with controlling its image in the media, especially in outlets that cater to elite audiences.” How oil companies manipulate journalism. | The Nation
- Brad Phillips on obsession, addiction, and Scrabble: “This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone.” | The Paris Review
- Inside the OpenAI office’s library, which represents the paradox at the heart of [the company’s] technology. | The New York Times
- Lorrie Moore reflects on Alice Munro’s legacy. | The Atlantic
- “Although Munro, who died Monday at 92, rarely depicted the sex explicitly…she wrote with such definite shading of looks and sound and erotically registered detail that you feel the shape of the sex more than you read it.” On how Alice Munro wrote sex. | Vulture
- Stephen Bell talks to Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker about children’s books, the collaboration between a writer and a visual artist, and colonial histories. | Harper’s Bazaar
