Lit Hub Daily: May 23, 2017

TODAY: In 1911, a ceremony to dedicate the New York Public Library is held, presided over by President William Howard Taft. 

• In the second of our new Lit Hub Lonform series, Karen Russell searches for home amid the homeless of Portland, and confronts America’s great manmade disaster. | Literary Hub
• Edwidge Danticat on the many stories of Port-au-Prince, and letting Haitians speak for themselves. | Literary Hub
• How Girlboss tries (and fails) to be a millennial Mary Tyler Moore Show. | Literary Hub
• Denise Mina tells the tales of Glasgow, and one of its most infamous murders. | Literary Hub
• Tita Ramirez remembers her friend, Nina Riggs, who, with months left to live, finished her memoir The Bright Hour. | Literary Hub
• On the genius of Chinua Achebe, who “enables us to hear the voices of Igboland in a new use of our own language.” | NYRB
• “To fully appreciate the novel’s longevity, artistry, and global resonance, it is essential to examine the unlikely confluence of factors that helped it overcome a difficult publishing climate and the author’s relative anonymity at the time.” How One Hundred Years of Solitude became a classic. | The Atlantic
• On a new biography of literary critic and New York Intellectual Diana Trilling, “a queenly Cold Warrior with a temperamental aversion to revolt.” | The New Yorker
• “These Polish poets’ verse is highly politicized but for the most part, vehemently apolitical—sometimes because it was a matter of survival.” On the use of poetry in protests and the work of Czeslaw Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, and others. | The Millions
• What Amazon Charts actually means for the publishing industry (aside from am additional opportunity for “bragging rights”). | The Guardian
• Remembering William Melvin Kelley, who “was intimately involved in discovering a new African American aesthetic, one catalyzed by the history-shifting politics of the Civil Rights and Black Power era” (and who is credited with coining the term “woke”). | Public Books
• Mass-market paperbacks are the most recent segment of publishing to (not) be dying. | Publishers Marketplace

Also on Lit Hub: We could really use Tony Judt these days · 5 Books Making News: Activists, American history, and AirBnb · A first look at the new Barbara Gowdy: from the novel Little Sister.

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