Lit Hub Daily: November 16, 2023

• “Why does the empathy we cultivate through literature often remain a performative gesture, confined to the realm of fiction and failing to take root in the real world?” Etaf Rum on reading and writing during crisis. | Lit Hub

• On the urgent wartime writings of Polish-American Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. | Lit Hub History

• “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.” Three moments in the life of a pretty famous scientist. | Lit Hub Biography

• One hundred years after the birth of Swedish literary prodigy Stig Dagerman, Diego Courchay goes in search of his typewriter. | Lit Hub

• Beth Kephart considers the eternal hope of rare books: “They keep what we can’t keep. They counterweight the dying.” | Lit Hub

• “When Michael Cunningham writes like himself, and not like an apostle, he is one of love’s greatest witnesses.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• From Sinan Antoon, poetry that gives voice to “a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli bombardments, displacement, and a longing to return home.” | Words Without Borders

• “Never has a writer of such enviable talents displayed such undiminishing patience for his reader, such evident and unpretentious pleasure in the pedagogical function of good prose.” Sam Adler-Bell on George Schialabba. | Commonweal

• Adrienne Westenfeld talks to LeVar Burton about fighting for the right to read in an era of book bans. | Esquire

• In praise of Emily of New Moon, the oft-forgotten L.M. Montgomery novel that deserves a second look. | New York Times

• In the first installment of “Higher Gossip,” a column on sex and love, Lillian Fishman advises a reader to take advantage of “a rare opportunity to be surprised.” | The Point

Also on Lit Hub: Nina LaCour on finding a story in her own backyard • On the magic of magnetic force • Read from Mónica Ojeda’s newly translated novel, Nefando (tr. Sarah Booker)