Lit Hub Daily: October 20, 2020
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1946, Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power,” is born.
- “The realities of ordinary enslaved women have stayed mostly off-screen.” Stella Dadzie on the history of public revolt and private resistance in the West Indies. | Lit Hub History
- When a young Malcolm X brought the Nation of Islam’s teachings to a working-class community. | Lit Hub History
- “Plath seems to be saying that nature will eventually revolt against humanity’s relentless incursion.” Sylvia Plath… nature writer? | Lit Hub
- Navigating crisis: Daniel Tam-Claiborne on Asian American solidarity in a post-Covid America. | Lit Hub Politics
- “He is a myth-maker, but also a dream restorer.” Marlon James on the myth-making power of Neil Gaiman’s fiction. | Lit Hub
- “A night in clubland wasn’t lived vicariously through social media or filtered through an Instagram feed; these nights were experienced raw and unspoiled.” A look back at NYC nightlife in the 1990s. | Lit Hub History
- “I was wearing a sailor uniform when I first encountered Toni Morrison’s work. It was the winter of 1994. I was seventeen.” Kanako Nishi on reading The Bluest Eye. | Lit Hub
- Poems by Phillis Wheatley and Paul Louis Dunbar, from Kevin Young’s new anthology of African American poetry. | Lit Hub
- On Martin Amis’s Inside Story, a “not loosely but fairly strictly autobiographical” novel. | The New Yorker
- Which books have the most disappointing endings—and why do they infuriate us? An investigation. | Washington Post
- Marina Magloire on a little-known part of Lucille Clifton’s legacy: her relationship to the spirit world. | The Paris Review
- The Hay Festival, a mainstay in the British literary landscape, canceled an event in Abu Dhabi after an employee accused a UAE minister of sexual assault. | The New York Times
- Sisters With Books, a book club that has lasted more than 20 years, “subscribes to an awareness of how we as women fit into this world — and how we as Black women can support one another.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- These books reflect the growing movement of digital activists and the latest conversations about their work. | Book Riot
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