Lit Hub Daily: May 8, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1880, Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, dies.
- Jonathan Corcoran on the teacher who showed him that writing begins far from the page: Pulitzer Prize winner Jayne Anne Phillips. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Elizabeth Graver remembers her friend and agent, Richard Parks: “Richard’s voice on the phone was always much as I remembered it: polite, even gentlemanly in an old-fashioned way, and kind to its core.” | Lit Hub Memoir
- “What would it mean to conceive of time outside our productive capacities—geological time, non-linear time, revolutionary time?” Angie Sijun Lou on soil, time, and recognizing alternate forms of sentience. | Lit Hub Nature
- “It’s painfully clear that my inherited ideas about how to be a woman are extreme and problematic.” Alexis Landau on how concepts of beauty are passed from mother to daughter. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Why are cantinas so important to Mexican literature? Because they’re also important to Mexican culture. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Heather Montgomery on neglect, the idealized child in Victorian England, and the creation of National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. | Lit Hub History
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“Between 1949 and 1976, an estimated 185,000 British women, mostly unmarried teenagers, were forced to put their babies up for adoption.” On the The Millstone by Margaret Drabble, a 1960s British novel for a post-Roe America. | Lit Hub Politics
Article continues after advertisement - Philippa Snow examines the works of the late Heather Lewis. | The Baffler
- “The argument that war breeds trauma may sound obvious now. But at the time, in the world of philosophy and clinical psychology, Fanon’s suggestion that psychic health is dependent upon social conditions was revolutionary.” On Frantz Fanon, Black horror, and J.D.’s Revenge. | The Point
- “Famous journalists castigating students for making a strategic choice they disagree with punctures these writers’ pretensions of objectivity.” Why student protesters are right to be skeptical of prestige journalism. | Jacobin
- Elisha Cohn considers the role of animal care in fiction: “Across nearly all of Nunez’s work, being a human is marked by sustained caretaking for some other creature, with significant consequences for the author’s understanding of the project of fiction writing itself.” | Public Books
- Jonathan Russell Clark considers the timeless allure of time travel stories. | Esquire
- “Can you publish Bridge to Terabithia in the age of Captain Underpants?” Dan Kois explores the marked decline in the number of kids who read for pleasure. | Slate
