Lit Hub Daily: November 2, 2022

• Ken Burns on trying to capture America through photographs, “without cloying nostalgia or unforgiving revisionism.” | Lit Hub Art & Photography

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• Emily Temple rounds up the 60 greatest academic satires, campus novels, and boarding school bildungsromans of the last 100 years. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Are You There, God? It’s Me, Judy: In which Judy Blume tells the story of her first period. | Lit Hub Memoir

• “I have said the word abortion more times in the past three months than in my whole life.” Nicole Walker on how to tell a true abortion story. | Lit Hub Craft

• How Langston Hughes warned the world of fascism—“Jim Crow with a foreign accent”—during the Spanish Civil War. | Lit Hub History

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• “To publish a collection of short stories in my nineties seems miraculous to me.” Hilma Wolitzer on returning to a favorite form. | Lit Hub

• A federal judge has blocked the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. | NPR

• “Katherine Dunn lived the hard-core life of a character in a Katherine Dunn novel.” Adrienne Raphel on the life and oeuvre of an icon. | The New York Times

• From Tana French to Nora Ephron, rapid-fire book recommendations from Zosia Mamet. | ELLE

• “Wharton remains committed to representing how wretched survival can be, even when that survival features the most luxurious of fabrics, goods, and surroundings.” Sarah Blackwood on the “continuous present” of The Custom of the Country. | The Paris Review

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• Caroline Kubzansky and Adriana Pérez report on how a book-banning controversy played out at a library in Chicago. | Chicago Tribune

• Edna Bonhomme recommends books that explore grief. | The Atlantic

• Considering the recent crop of novels by Hollywood auteurs. | The Drift

Also on Lit Hub: An ode to Harriet the Spy, the art monster of East End Avenue • On the exquisite banality of married texting • Read from Lucy Ellmann’s latest novel, Man or Mango?