Lit Hub Daily: November 5, 2020
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1940, Charles Lindbergh is elected president, beating out Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.
- “Now, thanks to the stadium seating, everyone will have a clear view of the top of your head.” Jerald Walker gets a bad haircut and goes downhill from there. | Lit Hub Style
- “In fiction, direct quotation appears as early as the 9th century AD, with the Arabic genre of adab literature.” A brief history of citational fiction and literary supercuts. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “The Babur Nama is an oddly modern text, almost Proustian in its self-awareness.” William Dalrymple on the 16th-century memoir far ahead of its time. | Lit Hub Biography
- “I pushed myself to treat digital life in the way so many of the people I spoke with did, as a space rife with opportunity.” Chris Stedman attempts to find humanity on the internet. | Lit Hub
- “There’s a couple of songs that all the songwriters wish they’d written and this is one of them. It’s perfect.” Wayne Coyne on the last song he’d play before dying. | Lit Hub Music
- “As a boy I felt the pressure of language, which is the pressure and illusion of containment…” Patrick Rosal on family history, language ecosystems, and life in the cane fields. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Meet the high school teacher who changed Kaveh Akbar’s life, Steve Henn. | Lit Hub
- Andrew Sean Greer on David Sedaris, Christian Lorentzen on Martin Amis, Molly Antopol on Nicole Krauss, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- The CrimeReads editors recommend 10 crime novels out in November that will provide a much-needed distraction. | CrimeReads
- “It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping.” Ben Ehrenreich interviews scholars of societal collapse. | New York Times Magazine
- National Build a Rocket Month, National How Was It Even Possible for That Person on Twitter to Write Four Thousand Words Today? Month and other alternatives to NaNoWriMo. | The New Yorker
- “He is dangerous and violent and angry and traitorous, but at the core of it all, the wellspring of Rabadash’s character defects is that he is a fool.” Revisiting C.S. Lewis on dangerous leaders. | Tor
- One good thing: a Rhinebeck bookstore is making sure kids in need have books for the holidays. | Forbes
- With the imposition of a second lockdown in France, which has one of the highest rates of book readership in the world, many people there are mourning bookstore closures again. | France 24
- Read some of the exchanges between J.M. Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson. The beloved Scottish authors had a warm friendship. | The Courier
- If you enjoy getting lost in a book, you may love any of these ten books about… books. | The Guardian
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