Lit Hub Daily: October 7, 2021

TODAY: In 1955, Allen Ginsberg, pictured here with Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs, reads from “Howl” for the first time at Six Gallery.  

• You know it when you see it: the 25 most iconic book covers in history. | Lit Hub

• “An institution based on social control instead of social well-being is an institution that needs to be abolished.” Colin Kaepernick on abolition and Black liberation. | Lit Hub Politics

• From The Gay Agenda to the Capitol insurrection, Stephanie Grant unpacks the uses and abuses of disgust. | Lit Hub

• The marriage experiment: Kimberly Harrington breaks down lifelong partnership into 16 simple (and excruciating) steps. | Lit Hub

• Create a charged setting, use direct (not plain) language, and more advice for writing a good fight scene. | Lit Hub Craft

• Into the Parisian studio with Enki Bilal, whose epic sci-fi comics “offer a new way of describing dystopia and metamorphosis.” | Lit Hub Comics

• Miles Marshall Lewis considers Kendrick Lamar’s 2016 Grammy’s performance, “a prime example of why he wears the mantle of Tupac Shakur.” | Lit Hub Music

• How Ralph Waldo Emerson helped transform the word “landscape,” and with it, Americans’ relationship to nature. | Lit Hub Nature

• “I suspect that I was informed aesthetically and ethically by Sesame Street more than any other thing.” Joshua Ferris takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub

• Liana Fink on David Sedaris, Cree LeFavour on Claire Vaye Watkins, Michele Filgate on Miriam Toews, and more of the Reviews You Need To Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Georgina Cross recommends ten books in which wealthy families “discover, to their grave disappointment, that money and stature might not be able to buy everything.” | CrimeReads

• On the connection between baking and the labor of publishing a book. | Catapult

• Looking back at a 1950s newsletter dedicated to gay literature, which amassed a mailing list in the thousands despite threats from the FBI. | The New Yorker

• Are coffee table books worth it? Design pros weigh in. | The Wall Street Journal

• Amitava Kumar in favor of using pictures in books for adults. | The Atlantic

• “You have a right to walk out that door. I have an obligation to say what I believe. This is how we get along.” A conversation with Nikki Giovanni. | Public Books

• On the “literary Wild West” of Homeric Biography. | Lapham’s Quarterly

• Jocelyn Nicole Johnson talks about the inspiration behind the stories in My Monticello. | Los Angeles Times

Also on Lit Hub: Emma Rothschild on women’s work in an-18th century French village • Rowan Jacobsen on the primordial pull of the truffle • Read from Elisa Victoria’s newly translated story collection, Oldladyvoice (tr. Charlotte Whittle)

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