Lit Hub Daily: October 15, 2019

TODAY: In 70 BCE, Publius Vergilius Maro AKA Virgil is born.

• It’s the Ben Lerner–Ocean Vuong conversation you hadn’t realized you needed! | Lit Hub
• Here are our takes on the best poetry collections of the past decade (this is the list that nearly broke us). | Lit Hub
• How did humans come to walk on two legs? Bill Bryson on the mysterious history of bipedalism. | Lit Hub Science
• “The way I have always dealt with writer’s block is to just keep writing terrible stuff.” Elizabeth Strout spills her literary secrets. | Lit Hub
• Iris Origo on the impossibility of capturing truth in a biography (and why we try anyway). | Lit Hub Biography
• How do we preserve the vanishing foods of the earth? On apples, blue honeysuckles, and the Soviet seed collector who protected the earth’s biodiversity. | Lit Hub Food
• In advance of the Frankfurt Book Festival, a brief history of the literature of this year’s “Guest of Honour,” Norway. | Lit Hub
• “The summer of porn and philosophy wasn’t as bizarre as I once thought.” Johan Harstad finds something in the trash. | Lit Hub
• Your House Will Pay author Steph Cha recommends five great American social crime novels, from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. | Book Marks
• Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo have been named the joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize. | BBC
• “Nothing belongs to the past. You still think of him, don’t you?” Read an excerpt from André Aciman’s Find Me (aka Call Me By Your Name 2) | Vanity Fair
• Who decides which books are “great,” anyway? | JSTOR
• John Banville speaks with John le Carré about spying (duh), English patriotism, and le Carré’s new novel—his 25th. | The Guardian
• A first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone sold for $57,000 (not including fees and taxes) at auction in England. | Newsweek
• “Why does such an amazing writer have so much bad sex?” An examination of Murakami’s blind spot. | Metropolis Japan
• After reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, Helen Joyce took a psychedelic retreat. | New York Review of Books
• “Perception is inevitably personal.” Alice Mattison on the experience of macular degeneration. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: “How It Felt,” a poem by Sharon Olds from the collection Arias • The collections of Robert Duncan and Jess • Read from Karina Sainz Borgo’s debut novel It Would Be Night in Caracas.

 

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