Lit Hub Daily: November 9, 2023

• Mark Kurlansky offers a brief history of onions in America. | Lit Hub History

• Bumping Pollock off his pedestal: Turns out, drip painting was actually invented by a Ukrainian grandmother. | Lit Hub Art

• “Stalin’s one and only culinary extravagance in those days was a bathtub full of pickled gherkins.” Witold Szabłowski on the culinary habits and preferences of the Soviet strongman. | Lit Hub Food

• “Too much responsibility, too many sharp blades, too many days working in hundred-degree temperatures.” Miguel M. Morales, Oswaldo Vargas, Lizbeth Luevano, and Julio Puente García discuss immigrant farmwork, exploitation, and finding literary authenticity. | Lit Hub Roundtable

• What Douglas Melville is reading now and next, from Freedom Flyers to Future Luxe. | Lit Hub Annotated Nightstand

• “A 970-page victory lap past all who ever doubted, diminished or dissed her.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• “What I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilisation, and in a culture war it may be that artists of all sorts can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.” Salman Rushdie on peace, freedom, myth, and Barbenheimer. | The Guardian

• Ben Ehrenreich talks to Gazan writer Asmaa al-Ghoul about her life and work, and her campaign to end the Israeli assault on Gaza. | Verso

• “The novel, a melodramatic saga of social climbing and doomed romance, is a deliberate anachronism in both its themes and its style.” Jess Bergman on Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante, the novelist who inspired Elena Ferrante. | The New Yorker

• Don’t quit your day job (seriously): Kate Dwyer digs into the state of authors’ finances. | Esquire

• “These novels depict a feminism in flight from demands for equality and toward a politics of grievance as it plays out in the bedroom.” Namwali Serpell considers the spate of “hit me” books (or “remaster novels”). | NYRB

Also on Lit Hub: Reclaiming freedom for feminism • New poetry from James Tate • Read from Jazmina Barrera’s newly translated novel, Cross-Stitch (tr. Christina MacSweeney)