Lit Hub Daily: November 12, 2021

TODAY: In 1969, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. The next year, he is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for The Gulag Archipelago.  

• Homo erectus—they’re just like us? Henry Gee compares us to our ancestors. | Lit Hub History

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• Lenny Abrahamson on adapting Sally Rooney’s Normal People for TV. (Sadly, no reference to the casting of Connell’s chain.) | Lit Hub TV

• “A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all.” Toward approaching the history of humanity as a project of collective self-creation. | Lit Hub History

• Seyward Darby considers the likelihood that the next Trump will be a white woman. | Lit Hub Politics

• Tim Marshall muses on the political future of post-Brexit England. | Lit Hub

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• Rejection hurts (especially when Henry James is involved). James Ivory recounts finally casting Vanessa Redgrave in The Bostonians. | Lit Hub Film

• “In a class for a genre I’d never studied, I was free to be a beginner.” Kyle Lucia Wu on what novelists can learn from poets. | Lit Hub Craft

• Patriots vs. Loyalists: H.W. Brands on the forgotten history of America’s first Civil War. | Lit Hub History

• Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter, and David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Caitlin Flynn asks, is there a connection between surviving assault and consuming true crime? | CrimeReads

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• “That’s what my work seeks to do—to tell people there are a hundred different types of hood girls in the hood.” Sesali Bowen on her new book, writing for Black women, and trap culture. | Bitch Media

• Reflecting on the good intentions and inevitable shortcomings of the antiracist book club. | Vox

• Tiphanie Yanique discusses her latest novel and how the past informs the present. | Shondaland

• Haris Durrani talks about why the lore of Dune is still relevant today. | NPR

• Philip Bump breaks down why efforts to ban books from school libraries are doomed to fail. | The Washington Post

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• Anthony Morreale reconsiders the literature of South Vietnam. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Ena Alvarado on interpretations of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and brotherhood that can “restore faith.” | JSTOR Daily

Also on Lit Hub: Bob Eckstein illustrates bookstores and libraries from around the country • Patricia Dunn recommends books about family secrets • Read from Selva Almada’s newly translated novel, Brickmakers (tr. Annie McDermott)

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