Lit Hub Daily: November 14, 2022

TODAY: In 1889, newspaper reporter Nellie Bly set out from New York to beat the record of Jules Verne’s imaginary hero Phileas Fogg, who traveled around the world in 80 days.  

• What to read from this year’s University Press Week, featuring works on race, religion, war, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

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• In the second installment of When I’m Not Writing, a series about writers and their hobbies, Kyle Lucia Wu talks curating sartorial courage. | Lit Hub Style

• Dorothe Nors spends the shortest night of the year—with witches and beach mums—on Denmark’s North Sea coast. | Lit Hub Travel

• “I never intended to become a poet. It’s just that I was addicted to feeling things strongly and then feeling nothing at all.” Su Cho on beginning her poetic journey. | Lit Hub Poetry

• Patrick Radden Keefe considers the opioid crisis and the Sacklers: “This is, at its essence, a story in which the bad guys get away with it in the end.” | Lit Hub

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• How an English bishop and classical scholar invented the second meaning of “irony” (a word we GREATLY overuse today). | Lit Hub History

• Dear Loosha: Chip Livingston remembers Kenward Elmslie and Lucia Berlin through their iconic postcards to each other. | Lit Hub Biography

• Ryan Britt reads the first Star Wars novel, 46 years later. | Esquire

• “Vonnegut’s writing questioned the motives of governments and institutions. And that has always resonated with young people.” Tom Vitale considers the war novels of Kurt Vonnegut. | NPR

• From Naked Lunch to Testo Junkie, Anne K. Yoder recommends seven books that explore the pharmaco-industrial complex. | Electric Lit

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• “Its tone is deadly serious high hilarity, if that can be considered a tone.” Michelle Latiolais on Fran Ross’s Oreo. | Public Books

• Emily Zarevich explores the history of the Beaver Hall Group, “an association of cutting-edge, Montreal-based artists whose allegiance lasted briefly, from 1920 to 1922.” | JSTOR Daily

• What are the most banned books in America? | CBS News

Also on Lit Hub: Overheard at literary speed dating • Confronting writer’s block in the early years of sobriety • Read a story from The Common’s fall issue 

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