Lit Hub Daily: May 24, 2023

• Summer’s in the air! Here are the 28 novels the Lit Hub staff thinks you should read this season. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

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• Simon Sebag Montefiore explores the lives of Roman and Mesoamerican dynasties, featuring “star wars,” stingray-pierced penises, and disease-spreading steam baths. | Lit Hub History

• “A feared leader is often a powerful one. But too much fear can paralyze the bureaucracy.” Chun Han Wong on Xi Jingping’s purges. | Lit Hub Politics

• On the lovable unlikability of Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse. | Lit Hub

• Laura Tillman talks to her mentor and former teacher, Suzannah Lessard, about crafting nonfiction that takes risks. | Lit Hub In Conversation

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• “T(Sakakawea)ish was not a Shoshoni. She was a Hidatsa.” What white history got wrong about Sacagawea. | New York Review of Books

• The history of nepo babies. | New Yorker

• Casting call for Will Sharpe’s adaptation of Crying in H Mart! | Rolling Stone

• Bulgarian novelist Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel have won this year’s International Booker Prize. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: How a fabulist painting showed Jenny Fran Davis the cover of Dykette • Kate Lebo on the recipe writer’s dilemma • Read from Dino Buzzati’s newly translated novel, The Stronghold (tr. Larry Venuti)