Lit Hub Daily: November 7, 2019

TODAY: In 1899, Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya premieres at the Moscow Art Theatre.

• “Apocalypse, non-apocalypse, who’s to say the difference?” David Ulin on death, sci-fi, and scenes from La Jetée. | Lit Hub
• Susannah Cahalan on the time Nellie Bly committed herself to the infamous Blackwell Island Asylum just to get the story. | Lit Hub History
• All of our good—and all of our evil—lies in wait in the archives: nine great novels of revelation and… research. | Lit Hub
• “It’s heartening to see so many artists, activists, and even news organizations starting to coalesce around this conversation about the urgency of the climate crisis.” Emma Sloley and Emily Raboteau in conversation. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• Inside the Republican party’s last-ditch scramble to save their House majority: Anne Nelson pulls back the curtain on the 2018 midterms. | Lit Hub Politics
• Big Data vs. Big Dada: Benjamin Aleshire on (briefly) going corporate as a poet-for-hire at a tech conference. | Lit Hub
• “Art destroys the world as it is and replaces it with something that is utterly other.” Curtis White on the radically compassionate films of Ai Weiwei and Agnès Varda. | Lit Hub
• Exotic pets, wild blood, and the search for human-animal connection at a reptile show. | Lit Hub Science
• The critics’ verdicts on Benardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Carmen Maria Machado’s dream house, Flea’s wild man memoir, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• International man of mystery Paul French takes us on a global tour of true crime podcasts. | CrimeReads
• “Science and literature alike are readers of the world. And, sooner or later, both lead us to the unreadable, the boundary at which the unintelligible begins.” Karl Ove Knausgaard on the slowness of literature and the problems of progress. | The New Yorker
• Adriana Herrera on “Own Voices romance novels”—in which immigrant stories are not defined solely through hardship, but revolutionary joy as well. | Bustle
• Eisa Nefertari Ulen writes about Shonda Buchanan’s new memoir, Black Indian, and the upending of the “Tragic Mulatto” archetype. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Justice for Sex and the City: journalist James Andrew Miller is publishing a tell-all oral history of HBO. | Vox
• “When we look at the macro level, we tend to blur out all identity.” Dina Nayeri on writing the complexity of refugees’ lives. | Guernica
• Novelist Ahmet Altan has been released from prison in Turkey, three years after his detention brought protests from writers and free speech advocates around the world. | The Bookseller
• Romanticizing the wilderness can become “a poorly cloaked exercise in colonial nostalgia,” Alex Hutchinson writes. | New York Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: Lessons from pretending to be a pretentious lit bro for 5 years • Andy Serkis and the doubleness of the movie star • Read an excerpt from Michael Crummey’s new novel The Innocents.

 

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