Lit Hub Daily: November 6, 2023

• How American critics established Jane Austen’s global reputation. | Lit Hub

• “Poems are smarter than I am. Like dreams, they come out of the dark and lead me to uncanny arrivals.” Diane Seuss explains the creative process behind the poem that matters most to her. | Lit Hub Craft

• “An elegy to German culture, a death mask in sound.” Jeremy Eichler on art, music, and the humanist spirit in the face of Nazi atrocities. | Lit Hub History

• What Marabou storks can teach us about thriving during apocalypse. | Lit Hub

• Alice Sparberg Alexiou recounts her odyssey in search of a long-lost relative. | Lit Hub Memoir

• On the lifesaving potential of (forged) Latin American passports in the Warsaw ghetto. | Lit Hub History

• “You can burn books, put their authors in prison, ban them or confiscate them. But tearing pages out is a punishment so nasty no one’s thought of it yet.” Ahmed Naji on the power of a prison library. | The Washington Post

• A brief history of book theft. | JSTOR Daily

• The best depictions of indecision in literature, from Hamlet to Waiting for Godot. | The Guardian

• “Most of his evaluations on his trip are superficial or banal or laughably snotty. What intrigues is how quickly he demands that things make sense.” Vivian Gornick on Camus’s begrudging book tour. | NYRB

• Some good news: Efforts to ban books are backfiring. | 13WHAM

• “Has the self/ ever been the subject/ of so much propaganda?” A poem by Fady Joudah. | New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Tracy K. Smith reveals her writing routine • Virginia Pye on the confidence it takes to write • Read from Elaine Feeney’s latest novel, How to Build a Boat