Lit Hub Daily: May 4, 2023

TODAY: In 1939, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is published.    

• Helen Oyeyemi on the rebel vocabulary of Ágota Kristóf: “If the likes of Kristóf and her kin have anything to do with it, we shall never feel that we’ve finished learning to read.” | Lit Hub Criticism

  Article continues after advertisement
  Remove Ads

• “I get the house. I get the car. I get the dog.” Hannah Pittard chronicles the morning after discovering her husband’s affair. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Mark Dunn Mulls considers what his 2001 novel, Ella Minnow Pea, can teach us about censorship and book bans today. | Lit Hub

• Tania James on what it means to be a writer—failure, joy, and all. | Lit Hub

• Hollywood horse girl: How Barbara Stanwyck stunt-rode her way through industry misogyny. | Lit Hub Film & TV

  Article continues after advertisement
  Remove Ads

• “You cannot applaud his debut novel without getting blood on your hands.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Andrea Bajani on Kafka and experiencing the death of a failed book. | The Believer

• “Was writing this an act of bravery, or self-delusion?” Leah Finnegan critiques Ben Smith’s look at the Internet of the 2010s. | The Baffler

• First they came for library books, now they’re coming for the libraries. | NPR

• “It’s not a masterpiece, but it might be something better.” Andrew Martin on Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. | NYRB

  Article continues after advertisement
  Remove Ads

• Ellen Notbohm on the killing of a ladybug, from the new issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. | DPA

Also on Lit Hub: Aaron Hamburger searches for his grandmother in Key West • Shelley Noble on stumbling into a story • Read from Carmen Boullosa’s newly translated novel, The Book of Eve (tr. Samantha Schnee)

---