Lit Hub Daily: October 17, 2022

TODAY: In 1896, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull premieres in St. Petersburg and flops, prompting him to declare, “Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play.” (Above, Chekhov reads The Seagull with the Moscar Art Theatre company in 1898, presumably after recovering from the failure.)    

• “Could Elmo’s and Cookie Monster’s wacky, lighthearted banter even be translated for Dostoevskian, angst-ridden Russians?” Natasha Lance Rogoff on a surprising job offer: to bring the Muppets to Moscow. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Read Émile Zola’s, T.S. Eliot’s, and George Orwell’s thoughts on cheese in Noëlle Janaczewska’s culinary and artistic history. | Lit Hub Food

• The tale of three Teslas: On Elon Musk, Nikola Tesla, and David Bowie’s sphinxlike, inaccurate role in The Prestige. | Lit Hub Tech

• “I’d had days. He’d needed 30 minutes.” Cody Keenan, chief speechwriter during the Obama administration, recounts the President’s historic Selma speech. | Lit Hub Politics

• Natasha Lasky on the (sexist) criticism Britney Spears received for her shifting voice, which to critics “made her seem vacant and spineless, an empty vessel waiting to be filled with her producers’ ideas.” | Lit Hub Music

• A brief history of the Morgenthaus, an American dynasty. | Lit Hub Biography

• “The question has been less about whether horror films are good and more a question of whether they matter.” W. Scott Poole considers the lonely crossroads of horror and the American century. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Joan Acocella reconsiders Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, Italy’s “exemplary historical novel.” | The New Yorker

• “It is frightening, to be in one sense wholly inextricable from your body and yet not know what’s happening inside it.” Julia Armfield on horror and the body. | The White Review

• Ryan Britt makes the case for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as the greatest piece of the Holmes canon. | Esquire

• Matthew Wills explores the history of the Task Force on Gay Liberation of the American Library Association, the first gay and lesbian professional organization in the United States, which challenged homophobic library classifications. | JSTOR Daily

• David Vogel gives a guide to books “that introduce a wider historical context for the way we deal with global illness.” | Vulture

• “For this book I thought: ‘I don’t want to be reactionary. I just want to feel into what the hell is going on with me or with a particular set of catastrophes.’” Harmony Holiday talks to Lauren Mackler about her book Maafa. | LARB

Also on Lit Hub: Sean Dietrich on a cancer diagnosis that inspired a 400-mile bike riding trip • How potato blight made Ireland into a country of emigrants • Read from Gabriella Ponce’s Newly Translated Novel, Blood Red (tr. Sarah Booker)

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