Lit Hub Daily: May 19, 2021

• “Dante’s Inferno begins: ‘Midway upon the journey of our life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood.’ That was me, stumbling into Tinderworld.” Nancy Jo Sales on the hellscape of dating apps. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Armchair catastrophist Jim Shepard reflects on the uncomfortable déjà vu of writing a pandemic novel pre-COVID-19. | Lit Hub

• Alexandra Kingston-Reese considers what we can learn about care work from the characters of Lorrie Moore and Ottessa Moshfegh. | Lit Hub

• “Creation does always have a price. But the price doesn’t have to be your soul.” Bridget Collins against the myth of the tormented artist. | Lit Hub

• James Grady remembers a surreal night in suburban DC, when he watched a Public Macho Standoff between Norman Mailer and G. Gordon Liddy. | Lit Hub

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• Barbara Becker on the lonely experience of infertility and miscarriage before social media, and the community she found, many years later, online. | Lit Hub

• Olivette Otele examines the origins of white Europeans’ bigoted fascination with race, as seen in art and fiction. | Lit Hub History

• Bethanne Patrick recommends five books in translation you might have missed in April, featuring Bruno Lloret, Eva Meijer, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Anna Karenina, The Vanishing Half, Where the Wild Things Are, and more rapid-fire book recs from Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell. | Book Marks

• Olivia Rutigliano reflects on the career of the late, great comic actor Charles Grodin, who brought the “straight man” persona to its knees. | CrimeReads

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• “When I’m open to beauty’s true power, I believe it changes me for the better.” Torrey Peters considers moments of unexpected beauty. | Harper’s BAZAAR

• Mary Beard talks to Katy Waldman about feminist translations, the fluidity of canons, and engaging with trolls. | The New Yorker 

• In the midst of ongoing public reckonings, “book publishing is having an existential crisis.” | Vox

• Brian Broome considers masculinity, the history of racism in America, and the memory of his father. | NPR

• Molly McGhee reflects on Dead Souls and the reality that “no matter how poor, there is money to be made from the dead.” | The Paris Review

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• Scott Ellsworth, who helped expose the events of the Tulsa race massacre to a national audience, discusses reparations and why “we do [students] a disservice by shielding them from the truth.” | Los Angeles Times

Also on Lit Hub: A reading list of outsiders, eccentrics, and misfits • Harrison Post: moneyed magnate or jazz-age grifter? • Read from Ailsa McFarlane’s debut novel, Highway Blue