Lit Hub Daily: October 18, 2021

TODAY: In 1851, The Whale, the English edition of Moby-Dick, is published. The English edition differs from the American edition in over 700 wordings and thousands of punctuation and spelling changes.     

• In our new series, Teaching Through a Pandemic, Molly Castner considers how “truth” became a controversial subject in classrooms, and Rashaan Alexis Meneses confronts a season of illness and fire. | Lit Hub Teaching

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• Oedipus at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter: Bryan Doerries on trauma, communal theater, and Sophocles. | Lit Hub Theater

• “With the local newspaper, I realized I wasn’t writing to be seen or to impress, I was writing as an act of service.” Lessons from Nickolas Butler, novelist-slash-small-town-columnist. | Lit Hub

• Meriel Schindler on the unusual relationship between Hitler and his family physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch, who happened to be Jewish. | Lit Hub History

• Sesali Bowen muses on beauty ideals and who gets to be a “bad bitch.” | Lit Hub

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• Read 19th-century reports from the western US about harrowing encounters with “large winged reptiles”… AKA, dragons. | Lit Hub

• What do journalists owe their subjects—especially unwilling ones? | Lit Hub

• “The nature of rising inequality is such that the circle of joy is always shrinking.” Matthew Stewart calculates the cruelty of the American Dream. | Lit Hub Politics

• The Book of Atlantis Black author Betsy Bonner talks Wuthering Heights, Bluets, and Mary Gaitskill’s sex scenes. | Book Marks

• “It is no accident that climate denialism is strongest in the settler-colonial countries of the Anglosphere.” Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Ben Ehrenreich. | Lit Hub Climate Change

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• “The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.” Looking back at John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. | Book Marks

• “It’s a terrible thing to be estranged from your own language because you don’t feel that you reach a certain standard.” Manon Steffan Ros discusses the spiritual power of translation. | Words Without Borders

• John Ganz considers the history of “performative.” | Gawker

• Helen Macdonald profiles Denis Villeneuve, the filmmaker breaking “the curse of Dune.” | The New York Times Magazine

• Elizabeth Gonzalez James discusses her book’s path to publication, millennial unemployment, and her writing influences. | Split Lip Magazine 

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• Watch a video of Eugene Lim and Jonathan Lethem in conversation, presented by Community Bookstore.  | Community Bookstore Live

• Chelsea G. Summers reflects on her experience selling books through TikTok and other social media platforms. | Dirt

• Lincoln Michel on writerly envy and the trap of the “ladder mindset.” | Countercraft

Also on Lit Hub: Louise Fein considers how epilepsy has been (poorly) portrayed in fiction • A poem by Tracy K. Smith • Read from Myriam J. A. Chancy’s latest novel, What Storm, What Thunder 

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