Lit Hub Daily: October 14, 2021

TODAY: In 1888, Katherine Mansfield is born.   

• A taxonomy of famous writers’ houses, from Lord Byron’s abbey to Hanya Yanagihara’s Soho loft. | Lit Hub

• “In this one, she never knows hunger or pure, crystalline fear. In this one, she does.” In which Lucas Mann writes about tiny, spectacular futures a week or so after a very damning IPCC climate report. | Lit Hub Climate Change

• Steph Cha wonders how mystery writers might respond to the tragedy, injustice, and crime on display in 2020. | Lit Hub

• How will humans measure time if biotechnology helps us live forever? Jeanette Winterson looks at the bigger picture of AI. | Lit Hub Tech

• “I know now that these things cast a very long shadow over my life.” Carole Angier considers how history shaped W.G. Sebald’s work. | Lit Hub Biography

• Katie Ives on the women who launched Summit, the first monthly climbing magazine in the US, when mountaineering was a “man’s world.” | Lit Hub Sports

• Todd Doughty recommends books that spark joy. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• In praise of couscous: Christine Sahadi Whelan shares the recipe for a weeknight favorite. | Lit Hub Food

• “My father even slept to Fox News, his nighttime ears serenaded by fearmongering about Archie Bunker’s lost American dream.” Phillip Hurst searches for inner peace in the wake of his father’s ideology. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Christian Lorentzen on Richard Powers’ Bewilderment, Tony Tulathimutte on Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• James McGrath Morris on Tony Hillerman and the origins of his iconic second fiddle, Jim Chee. | CrimeReads

• Read a new short story by Chen Qiufan, translated by Emily Jin. | Noema

• Victoria Chang discusses her book, the strange nature of memory, and silence as inheritance. | NPR

• “Everyone is somebody’s agent, his novels seem to be saying; everyone is the instrument of a power they have no ability to counter or even recognize.” Jake

• Bittle on John Le Carré’s genius for surveillance. | The New Republic

• Jay Caspian Kang explores how the term “Asian American” became “mostly meaningless.” | The Nation

• Juan Gabriel Vásquez considers the power of fiction “to liberate us from our frustratingly limited perspectives on life.” | Words Without Borders

• Rebecca Solnit talks about reading George Orwell in an era of climate crisis. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Gary Budden breaks down the books that engage with urban legends. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: On the complexities of the 1763 Berbice slave rebellion • How opera invented the modern fan • Read from Margaret Verble’s latest novel, When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky

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