Lit Hub Daily: October 18, 2022

TODAY: In 1950, Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Wendy Wasserstein is born.  

• Unsurprisingly, George Saunders is kind of a chaotic reader. | Lit Hub

• Ross Gay sings the praises of adult braces, feeling needed, and kissing a very small dog one million times. | Lit Hub Memoir

• “It is this uneasiness that helped me nurture such a wild and fucked-up imagination—an imagination that can be great for writing, when it gets its shit together.” Samantha Irby on alchemizing anxiety. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Here are 13 new books to get excited about this week. | The Hub

• Rose Levy Beranbaum’s recipe for lemon madeleines (because it’s cookie time somewhere). | Lit Hub Food

• Irene Vallejo on bookselling among Aristotles’s sun-drenched olive groves in Ancient Greece. | Lit Hub History

• Broadcasting loneliness: Ethan Chatagnier on Kristen Radtke’s Seek You, the two Voyager probes, and sharing secrets in chat rooms. | Lit Hub

• Andrew Shanken considers Central Park’s memorials: “They are symbols of authority, stand-ins for the powers that placed them there.” | Lit Hub

• Could dating apps help mitigate racial bias in dating—instead of exacerbating it? | Lit Hub Tech

• The best international crime fiction of fall 2022. | CrimeReads

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explores the perpetual relevance of Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 study of US slavery, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. | The New Yorker

• Nicole Chung offers strategies for writing when you feel stuck. | The Atlantic

• “The department store is not only a highly specific setting, it’s crucial: it compels you to become someone other than yourself.” Adrienne Raphel considers The Price of Salt and the department store as “the locus of fantasy and lust.” | Astra

• Matthew James Seidel revisits John Wyndham’s 1953 novel: “ On the surface, The Kraken Wakes seems to have nothing to do with climate change.” | LARB

• For the short story stans: Daphne Kalotay recommends ten award-winning collections. | The Washington Post

• Sanya Osha talks about the importance of the amapiano genre of music in South Africa. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Lauren Christensen delves into the story of the oldest surviving book in the Americas. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Maira Kalman’s illustrations of women holding things • Read a poem by Jan Zábrana, translated by Justin Quinn • Read from The Last Chairlift 

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