Lit Hub Daily: May 21, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1908, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, a film adapted from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, premieres in Chicago. It is widely considered the first American horror movie.
- How do authors get famous? Unless you’re willing to wait for posthumous renown, Oprah’s Book Club might be your best bet. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “The book is the same every time, but I am different, so what it offers me is different.” Jessie Gaynor on rereading The Corrections while navigating her mother’s Parkinson’s. | Lit Hub Memoir
- In praise of quietly unlikeable women: “I found in these women not just drifters but searchers.” | Lit Hub Craft
- “If there is anything scholars agree on, it is that existing notions of black identity, community, and culture have diversified and splintered beyond recognition…” Yogita Goyal on the difficulty of categorizing contemporary African American literature. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Kevin Kwan on his favorite classics (and the ones he has yet to read). | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “Mexicans and Canadians claimed moral superiority over Americans who boasted of their freedom while keeping 4 million Blacks enslaved.” How differing national visions divided the North and the South. | Lit Hub History
- Jane Ciabattari talks to R.O. Kwon about writing the most truthful version of a book. | Lit Hub In Conversation
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R. O. Kwon, Kent Wascom, Joyce Carol Oates, and more! These 25 new books are out right now. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
Article continues after advertisement - “On the night Alan, my first serious boyfriend, dumped me, I lay awake on the couch I called ours, though he’d been the one to pay for it, waiting for anger or sadness or relief to come.” Read from Thomas Grattan’s novel, In Tongues. | Lit Hub Fiction
- On (not) reading: Anthony Lane explores the rise of book-abbreviation apps. | The New Yorker
- “To read Roy’s early nonfiction is to be astonished by her prescience about the situation in which India finds itself now.” Yogita Goyal on reading Arundhati Roy in the present. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Why should you care about thought-terminating cliches? “..anyone interested in power is able to weaponize thought-terminating cliches to dismiss followers’ dissent or rationalize flawed arguments.” | The Guardian
- On the history of America’s first mail-order service for gay books. | Book Riot
- Graphic novelist Emil Farris on why being monstrous is “completely misunderstood.” | Vulture
- Celebrity book clubs are having a moment. Here’s a deep dive into Reese Witherspoon’s. | The New York Times
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