Lit Hub Daily: May 23, 2023

• “What my grandmothers gave me, I now offer to you.” Kwame Alexander considers the legacies of love passed down through food… and shares a family recipe for 7 Up Pound Cake. | Lit Hub Food

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• Show some love to these 25 new books out today. | The Hub

• Susanna Kaysen revisits Girl, Interrupted 30 years later: “Back then, this was not a topic for discussion, rather something to be kept secret.” | Lit Hub Memoir

• Naoíse Mac Sweeney asks why we still cling to a version of Western history we know to be untrue. | Lit Hub History

• Four suitcases for four kids: Rachel Snyder remembers the beginning of the end of her family. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Rachel Aviv writes about the tortured bond between Alice Sebold and  Anthony Broadwater, the man wrongfully imprisoned for her rape. | New Yorker

• Jacki Lyden on the beauty and heartbreak of public radio. | Arrowsmith Press

• On Henry James’s only political novel, 1886’s The Princess Casamassima—and the warning it holds for contemporary America. | The Atlantic

• Crazy stat of the day: The majority of book challenges filed across the United States in 2021 and 2022 were done so by just 11 people, who seem to have a problem with “sex” and LGBTQ people. | Washington Post

• How a novelist became an innkeeper (they bought an inn?). | New York Times

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• There are more independent bookstores in America today than there were this time last year. That’s good news. | The Hub

Also on Lit Hub: On the need for more stories about ordinary female scientists • Avery Carpenter Forrey on social media and memory • Read from Ivy Pochoda’s latest novel, Sing Her Down