Lit Hub Daily: October 21, 2019

TODAY: In 1971, Pablo Neruda is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

• “Duras’s body of work is a reminder that it’s okay to press send, to publish your drafts.” On Marguerite Duras, proto-internet essayist. | Lit Hub
• Teaching climate change with The Lorax and The Jungle: Mark Gozonsky on his unconventional climate syllabus. | Lit Hub
• If you’d like to chill your wine in John Steinbeck’s silver bucket, you’re in luck: a bunch of the man’s memorabilia is available from his estate. | Lit Hub
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, the reception of Willa Cather’s World War I novel was incredibly sexist. | Lit Hub
• Yes, printed-out emails count as letters: Dheepa Maturi on the value of epistolary correspondence, in whatever form. | Lit Hub
• “In gift exchange, the brevity of individual possession serves to preserve the longevity of the collective.” Lewis Hyde revisits his bestselling classic The Gift on its anniversary. | Lit Hub
• From modern Calvary in the Catskills to small penis paintings: The life and times of McDermott and McGough, true artists of downtown New York City. | Lit Hub
• “Too often in fiction, coincidences feel rigged. Yet our lives are studded with them.” Martha Cooley on the Vajont disaster, Julio Cortazar, and the strange power of serendipity. | Lit Hub
• What to read when you’re done with Watchmen: from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman to Christopher Priest’s Black Panther. | Book Marks
• Sara Danius, the first woman to chair the Nobel Prize for Literature committee, died at 57. Danius was a key figure in the decision to award the prize to Bob Dylan, as well as the sexual assault scandal that rocked the academy in 2018. | The New York Times
• “Do we really long for a champion that much?”: Novelist (and frequent literary prize jurist) John Boyne defends the decision to award two Booker Prizes this year. | The Irish Times
• Julian Baggini’s trip to visit the site of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lakeside home in Norway made him wonder: what is the point of secular pilgrimages?| Aeon
• “This book is an encapsulation of the things that haunt me, things that I haven’t been able to resolve.” Liz Phair on writing memoir, person vs. persona, and #MeToo. | Vogue
• Pete Buttigieg might be behind in the polls, but he’s won the coveted “most popular Democratic presidential candidate memoir among a small subset of public library patrons” award. | Slate
• “No secret service can work properly for an incompetent, directionless government”: read a prolife of John le Carré. | The Wall Street Journal
• In her introduction to The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019, Carmen Maria Machado discusses the uninteresting distinctions between “literary” and “genre” fiction. | Tor

Also on Lit Hub: William Dalrymple on the two Mughal princes who stood in the way of the British East India Company • The diplomatic gambit that opened Cuba up to the world • Read an excerpt from Deborah Levy’s novel The Man Who Saw Everything.

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