Lit Hub Daily: May 30, 2024

TODAY: In 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) is published in Buenos Aires.

“As I became more entrenched in the White nationalist movement, I gained more power to cause more harm to people and society in ways I came to deeply regret.” R. Derek Black on the extreme ideology of their upbringing and how young White nationalists are programmed to hate. | Lit Hub Memoir
“I do not believe that cancer is an act of God—neither test, punishment or salvation.” Graham Caveney on illness, the body, and the philosophy of mortality. | Lit Hub Health
The beautiful, the innovative, and the My Little Pony realness: these are the best book covers of May. | Lit Hub Design
“I think most short stories are glorified therapy sessions… Am I the literary asshole?” | Lit Hub
“The novel draws on a long tradition of mystical writing that confuses sacred and secular desire.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
Jenna Tang on translating Lin Yi-Han’s infamous novel, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise: “Long before I decided to translate the novel, people told me, This is a book I’d never dare to read.” | Lit Hub On Translation

“The first time I kissed an Indian, it didn’t feel like incest, and I was surprised.” Read from Sejal Shah’s new fiction collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry. | Lit Hub Fiction
Claire Messud talks to Joshua Cohen: “But I think in this particular time, in this 21st century, there is a real awareness of the colonial histories and legacies and how terrible they were.” | Interview
“I don’t believe in isolated movements. I believe that everything is intertwined, and nothing stands separately. I want to be in everything.” Read the 1980 interview between Dimitris Gkionis and Greek poet and actress Katerina Gogou, translated by Christina Chatzitheodorou. | Asymptote
Cinque Henderson on the late Helen Vendler: “When I first made my way to her office hours all those years ago, I had no real interest in the British or the poetry they had written. I just wanted to be around her.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
The case for engaging critically with the contents of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. | JSTOR Daily
Garth Greenwell revisits Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples, a book that “stands outside the affirmative current of queer triumphalism that has overtaken more nuanced accounts of gay literature and gay lives.” | The New Yorker
“The writer may not be a ‘powerless observer,’ but it is political movements, not poets, who make history.” Gustav Jönsson on the writers who survived fascism. | Jacobin

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