Lit Hub Daily: November 29, 2022

TODAY: In 1918, Madeleine L’Engle is born.  

• Nick Fuller Googins makes the case for selling Simon & Schuster to… the employees of Simon & Schuster. | Lit Hub

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• The 23 best old books we read (or reread) in 2022. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Read a new translation of “The Caucasus” by Ukrainian poet-hero Taras Shevchenko: “The bones / Of many soldiers languish there. / And what of blood, and what of tears?” | Lit Hub Ukraine

• Nick Ripatrazone finds delightfully strange and unwieldy poetry in the literary journal archives. | Lit Hub

• Mary-Alice Daniel on understanding where we’re from, “a task of nuance and nuisance.” | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Get cozy with the perfect octet of new books, out this week. | The Hub

• “We’re quickly losing human scale, a sense of neighborhoods, the feeling that we’re all in the same boat and on the same subway car.” Michael Kimmelman and Lucy Sante discuss a shapeshifting New York City. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• Walter Mosley on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet. | CrimeReads

• Step inside the world of Octavia Butler: “This is the story of how she came to see a future that is now our present.” | The New York Times

• “Why must the bar be at a Faustian-bargain level of low?” Kathryn Jezer-Morton on the frustrating search for actually good kids’ books. | The Cut

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• How did a Holocaust memoir become a self-help phenomenon? | Vox

• “I’ve survived [because] I want to live. Even in our troubled world… I want to be alive. I want to breathe. I want to do my work.” Chloé Cooper Jones profiles Patti Smith. | Harper’s Bazaar

• Maggie Doherty on Kathy Acker’s oeuvre: “By stealing the work of others, the author remade herself—and reinvented what autobiographical writing could be.” | The New Yorker

• “My writing is political because all writing is, whether the writer intends it or not.” Kavita Das, Gaiutra Bahadur, and Gabrielle Bellot on writing about social issues. | Catapult

• Jason Bailey considers recent (and similar) books by Bob Dylan and Quentin Tarantino. | Slate

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Also on Lit Hub: Take a literary tour of the new American West • On the writerly need to find ideas in unexpected places • Read a story by Gina Nutt in NDA: An Autofiction Anthology

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