Lit Hub Daily: May 6, 2019

TODAY:In 1757, poet Christopher Smart is confined to St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in London.

• As we welcome the Royal Baby, his honorship the babyduke of Sussex, Robert Morrison wonders why America is so obsessed with the British royal family. | Lit Hub
• Who creates an Australian national literature? Nam Le on David Malouf and the violence of world-building. | Lit Hub
• “White’s patriotism is clear-eyed; his nationalism nonexistent.” Jon Meacham on E.B. White and American democracy. | Lit Hub
• “It’s rather like a long first date.” Nina Subin on the careful process of taking an author’s photo. | Lit Hub
• “Everyone is an expert of their own life.” On creating a new toolkit for memoir writing. | Lit Hub
• Designer Nicole Caputo on how to use red, white, and blue on a book cover. | Lit Hub
• “He did not care twopence if people came in to see his pictures…” On Hugh Lane and the world’s first public gallery of modern art. | Lit Hub
• An Experimental Library Grows in Brooklyn: Dev Aujla’s Sorted Library is reimagining the experience. | Book Marks
• It’s not all sun and fun in the French Riviera: Paul French takes us on a tour of noir along the Côte d’Azur. | CrimeReads
• Patti Smith’s Just Kids is the winner of the One Book, One New York program for 2019. | NYC Mayor’s Office
• “I wasn’t reading about Maslowian peak experiences, I was having them.” When Mesha Maren stopped writing in order to live. | The Paris Review
• “The acoustics can be a nightmare.” The Boston Lyric Opera is mounting a production of The Handmaid’s Tale  (the opera) in a basketball stadium. | The New York Times
• “If writing novels has taught me anything, it’s that progress isn’t linear.” Laura Lippman on tennis, competition, and the unexpected pleasure of being mediocre at something. | Glamour
• Imtiaz Dharker has turned down the job of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. | The Guardian
• As nations gauge the health of democracies around the world, authors, historians, booksellers and more are taking an interest in one peculiar market: fascism. | Los Angeles Times
• A new app from Google, Poem Portraits, is an interactive poem generator that is using artificial intelligence, images and 20 million words from 19th-century poetry to create a massive collective poem. | AndroitPIT

Also on Lit Hub: The passionate beginnings of Georg Forster, revolutionary travel writer • Interview with a bookstore: The Silver Unicorn • Read from Lindsey Drager’s new novel, Archive of Alternate Endings

 

---