Lit Hub Daily: May 23, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1911, President William Howard Taft presides over a ceremony to dedicate the New York Public Library.
- “Whenever I walk to the queer bars in the West Village (places I, a happy-hour connoisseur, frequent often), I pass by the building where Muñoz’s office was located.” Marcos Gonsalez takes a stroll through Jose Esteban Muñoz’s New York City. | Lit Hub Biography
- Elizabeth Costello considers desire, death, and socially aware subtext in James Tiptree Jr.’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Richard Russon on Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” and the significance of the sequence of words. | Lit Hub Craft
- Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, Alison Bechdel’s Spent, and Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “The truth, as it often is, turns out to be both simpler and more profound than our imaginations.” Arvind Ethan David explores the surprising connection between Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Martha Park recommends apocalyptic nonfiction by Mark O’Connell, Emily Raboteau, Jeff Sharlet and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- T.J. Martinson examines the role of sight on the page and in real life: “What we see and how we see it shapes who we are—or at least, who we believe ourselves to be—by constructing, distorting, and defining our reality.” | Lit Hub Craft
- “It was raining heavily and there was a darkness that hung over the city like a moral eclipse.” Read from Juan José Millás’s novel Only Smoke, translated by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Joel Suarez considers education’s “fraught relationship to both elitism and democracy.” | n+1
- Translator Ann Goldstein recommends books with “solid English rhythms, English idioms, English locutions, English sounds—the things that I like to have somewhere in my mind, though not necessarily consciously, when I’m working.” | The New Yorker
- “Her debut novel…was far more daring for its time than any of the recent literary trends that have had everyone blushing and gasping and scribbling.” Namwali Serpell revisits Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales.| New York Review of Books
- Lora Kelley on Martin Amis as “one of our last great literary celebrities.” | The Paris Review
- James Dubinsky explores the lessons we can learn about honoring the dead from poetry written by veterans. | JSTOR Daily
- Richard Ovenden on Elyse Graham’s Book and Dagger and the librarians who were spies. | Public Books
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