Lit Hub Daily: May 23, 2022

• A.J. Bermudez considers writing and mourning, each “a constant negotiation between the political and the personal.” | Lit Hub

• “They generally were clean, and lighted, though not necessarily well, the places I occupied in exchange for a salary during the past 48 years of my life.” Xu Xi reflects on the transnational literary life. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• On Jane Austen, Kazuo Ishiguro, and the unhappy happy ending. | Lit Hub

• Marie Myung-Ok Lee talks to Jimin Han about the slowness of writing, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and more. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• A bittersweet book release: Robbie Quinn reflects on becoming his wife’s writing partner at the end of her life. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Yan Lianke explores the overlooked literature of mythorealism. | Lit Hub

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• My queer life is not inappropriate: Nicole Melleby on writing for young readers like her. | Lit Hub

• “Someday, the animals may have no place to go, and neither will we.” Jeff VanderMeer on the destruction of Florida’s wilderness. | Current Affairs

• Marc Tracy explores how Hollywood and the media fueled the political rise of J.D. Vance. | The New York Times

• Hannah Gold revisits Rachel Carson’s writing about the sea. | The Nation

• “For artists, postcards are often attractive propositions—semi-intimate and semipublic, their audience largely accidental and mostly postal.” Rebecca Bengal on Ellsworth Kelly’s postcards. | The Paris Review

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• How is BookTok affecting the way we talk about books? | Book Riot

• Aimee Picchi looks at the ways that Barnes & Noble is under pressure to stop selling books that have been banned in some areas of the country. | CBS News

• “Solitude, I believe, can be very sexy. In solitude, like masturbation, the body opens—but if not to another, then to what?” Melissa Febos on celibacy, pleasure, and Hildegard von Bingen. | Astra Magazine

Also on Lit Hub: Elizabeth Hardwick on the capable coolness of Faye Dunaway • Funny books for an unfunny world • Read from Karen Jennings’s new novel, An Island