
Lit Hub Daily: October 22, 2019
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1919, Doris Lessing is born.
- Our end-of-decade accounting continues with the best memoirs of the 2010s. Like life, this involved some hard choices. | Lit Hub
- David Ulin on the countercultural influence of Peanuts, and Linus, “boy philosopher, wise beyond his years.” | Lit Hub
- “Darkness and strangeness abound in children’s literature, as they should. Anything else would be a lie.” Cara Hoffman gets real about kid lit (and talking mice). | Lit Hub
- Houdini’s greatest escape was from fraud charges in Germany, and the trial was predictably sensational. | Lit Hub Biography
- “To the end she was both restless and routinized, selfish and generous, straightforward and elliptical.” On the gloriously understated career of Elaine Stritch. | Lit Hub Biography
- “You have to learn how your body speaks.” A day in the life of a lion tracker. | Lit Hub Science
- Dead Kennedys in the West: How the San Francisco punk scene of the 1970s got political. | Lit Hub Music
- Things We Didn’t Talk about When I Was a Girl author Jeannie Vanasco recommends five great nonfiction books with metanarratives. | Book Marks
- “Bright lights cast the darkest shadows.” Erica Wright searches for the most glamorous women characters in crime fiction, and questions the meaning of the femme fatale. | CrimeReads
- “I only represent myself. Nobody should represent a country.” Yiyun Li on why she’s “not ready” to engage with readers in China. | The Nation
- Liana Finck on Ogden Whitney’s female characters, who “live to find love.” | The Paris Review
- Who says poetry doesn’t pay? A woman in Los Angeles paid part of a DMV fine with a copy of her recent poetry collection. | Los Angeles Times
- Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk will open a foundation in Wroclaw, Poland to aid authors and translators. | The First News
- Audible UK has partnered with Uber to offer passengers several free in-app short stories as alternatives to “stressful” news headlines. | The Bookseller
- In a new book, Ben Crump, the Florida lawyer who represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, asks how American laws and policing practices have enabled “legalized genocide.” | The Philadelphia Inquirer
- “I got a lot of mail of people saying, ‘Why doesn’t he eat the peach?’” André Aciman on insecurity, sex scenes, and Find Me. | Time
Also on Lit Hub: Remembering Kate Braverman’s Los Angeles • Alejandro Zambra on one of the great diarists of the 20th century, Julio Ramon Ribeyro • Read a story from Hebe Uhart’s collection The Scent of Buenos Aires (trans. Maureen Shaughnessy).
Article continues after advertisement

Lit Hub Daily
The best of the literary Internet, every day, brought to you by Literary Hub.