Lit Hub Daily: November 21, 2019

• “You are temporary. Matera is not.” Michael Cunningham visits one of the oldest cities in the world. | Lit Hub Travel
• Is the debutante one of the most misunderstood characters in literature? On what scholars have missed in Wharton, Bronte, and more. | Lit Hub
• “We crammed our tools and baggage in the trunk of the sidecar.” Sylvain Tesson retraces Napoleon’s historic retreat from the Russian front. | Lit Hub History
• Who were the scribes who actually wrote down the Epic of Gilgamesh (aka the longest poem-in-progress of all)? | Lit Hub
• “To speak of the urban condition . . . is to speak of the condition of American life.” When a city goes bankrupt: a brief history of Detroit, c. 2010. | Lit Hub History
• “. . . their lives and bodies were embedded in this quilt.” Piecing together the histories of enslaved Americans in the study of textiles. | Lit Hub History
• An ode to women who walk: from Lizzy Stewart’s graphic meditation on contemporary life in London. | Lit Hub
• Maris Kreizman lays the smack: Why the Big Five publishers “are still putting out books by people who not only play fast and loose with the facts, but who actively spread hate.” | Vanity Fair
• Do we have the culture of infinite scroll to thank for the rise of autofiction? | The New York Times
• “If Sally Rooney’s skinny, precocious Irish beauties are this upset, then certainly I have every right to give up on the world.” On the rise of “dissociative feminism.” | BuzzFeed News
• Behrouz Boochani, the Iranian writer who was held in an Australian immigration camp on Manus Island, is now in New Zealand for a literary festival. The question of his immediate future is, according to Boochani, up in the air.  | New York Daily News
• This list of ten compelling books about vegetarians and vegetarian ethics does not, contrary to expectations, include Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Do archivists have political motivations, too? · Lindsay McCrae on filming baby penguins in Antarctica.