Lit Hub Daily: November 3, 2023

TODAY: In 1998, Bob Kane, American comic book writer and co-creator of Batman, dies at 83. (Photo courtesy of UNESCO.)  

• “We strongly believe that now is a time to speak, freely and without fear of reprisal.” An open letter to the 92nd Street Y from 33 writers, in response to the cancellation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s recent event. | Lit Hub

• “She was a woman writing science fiction, a feminist, a disabled person, and a lesbian. She wrote work that didn’t always fit easily into one genre or another.” Nicole Rudick on the groundbreaking Joanna Russ. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Manufacturing as muse: On the photographs of Christopher Payne. | Lit Hub

• Wole Talabi recommends contemporary books by African authors that take inspiration from mythology. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “Commercially dubious and politically dangerous.” When Charlie Chaplin brought The Great Dictator to screen. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• We almost got a superhero movie from The Exorcist director William Friedkin. Might it have saved us from the MCU? | Lit Hub Comics

• Carlo Rovelli’s White Holes, Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, and Alice McDermott’s Absolution all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Read an open letter from Jewish writers who “wish to disavow the widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic.” | n+1

• “You can learn an awful lot about people, culture, and politics by studying R.” Linguists dig into the strangeness of the letter R. | Atlas Obscura

• Augusto Higa Oshiro recommends eight books that capture the complexity of Lima. | New York Times

• “If we want to imagine how the paintings in the museum were seen by their contemporaries, our only option is to look for the stories they tell.” Antonio Muñoz Molina on the act of reading a painting (translated by Guillermo Bleichmar). | The Hudson Review

• Graywolf Press has launched an Graywolf Lab, “an online platform for interdisciplinary conversations and new writing.” | Graywolf Lab

Also on Lit Hub: John Manuel Arias discusses decolonial storytelling • Why 1950s Hollywood failed to make successful literary adaptations • Read from Katherine Vaz’s latest novel, Above the Salt

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