Lit Hub Daily: May 25, 2022

TODAY: In 1925, Mexican poet and author Rosario Castellanos is born.    

• “Now my job is to read reports. To know everything. As if knowing everything will help.” Two essays about life in wartime Ukraine. | Lit Hub Ukraine

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• It’s complicated: Lillian Fishman recommends books about solipsistic, transformative love. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Lily King on the childhood recipes we carry with us. | Lit Hub Food

• “If I weren’t a writer, I’d probably be a small-scale sawmill operator who wrote about being a small-scale sawmill operator in his spare time.” Jon Mooallem takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub

• Lauren Shufran considers how Shakespeare engages with Buddhism’s dukkha, or suffering. | Lit Hub Religion 

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• “When I run, I’m not taking a break from life; I’m living.” Andrea Marcolongo on running to live and running to write. | Lit Hub

• Behind the creation of the first female superhero comic, which “thumbs its nose at the traditionally macho conventions” of the genre. | Lit Hub History

• Global journeys and impromptu swims: Jane Ciabattari captures the Bay Area Book Festival in six acts. | Lit Hub

• David Yoon with the 10 most captivating apocalypse novels. | CrimeReads

• How 19th-century gun-makers helped preserve the Union. | Lit Hub History

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• “Trying to recreate the original high of a singular reading experience has diminishing returns.” Maris Kreizman looks at the legacy of Gone Girl, ten years later. | Esquire

• Women over 45 are reliable book buyers—so why won’t the publishing industry consult or celebrate them? | The Bookseller

• “If the process of creation is precisely what traditional biography cannot illuminate, then what purpose does the genre serve? Is it just a form of higher gossip?” Morten Høi Jensen considers the literary biography. | Liberties

• Iggy Pop and Ottessa Moshfegh discuss raging against the machine. | Document Journal 

• In response to news about book bans in the US, Margaret Atwood is creating an “unburnable” edition of her book The Handmaid’s Tale. | The Guardian

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• Isabelle Popp outlines some of the best road trip books out there. | Book Riot

• “The meaning of death in a secularized society suffuses Knausgaard’s writings as much as the question of religion does.” Daniel Silver searches for meaning in The Morning Star. | The Point

Also on Lit Hub: A conversation with Sarah Ruhl • Read an excerpt from Emma Grove’s new graphic memoir, The Third Person • Read from Daniel Birnbaum’s newly translated novel, Dr. B (tr. Deborah Bragan-Turner)

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