Lit Hub Daily: November 10, 2023

TODAY: In 1961, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is published.  

• “Throughout recorded history, humans have regarded the art of writing with awe and even reverence.” How writing made us human. | Lit Hub History

• Tom Clavin recounts the bloody, doomed final days of the infamous bandits the Dalton Gang. | Lit Hub History

• “Coppola has architected an entire career out of the aestheticization of a waiting woman.” On the emptiness of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, and Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• “Humanity has already passed the last off-ramp for a vast number of species, and it’s a lot harder to imagine how we get back to stable ground. So what do we tell our kids?” Aaron Regunberg on reading children’s books in an age of mass extinction. | The New Republic

• What’s the future of books? Celebrity picks, imprints as brands, and “literary genre fiction.” | Esquire

• The feminist website Jezebel has been shuttered by G/O Media after 16 years of operation. | Nieman Lab

• “The protagonists of both novels also gain agency in language, whether through Way Way’s persistent letter-writing or Tango’s penchant for wordplay.” H.M.A. Leow considers the work of Burmese novelists Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone. | JSTOR Daily

• “Better than anyone else, Wylie and his agency have figured out how to globalise and monetise literary prestige.” Alex Blasdel profiles Andrew Wylie. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Why there should be more books about breakups • Read “Orville,” a poem by Rudy Francisco • Read from Yasunari Kawabata’s newly translated novel, The Rainbow (tr. Haydn Trowell)

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