Lit Hub Daily: October 8, 2021

• Kelefa Sanneh traces country music’s evolution from twangy regional phenomenon to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” and how it’s remained a genre worth fighting over. | Lit Hub Music

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• Howard Markel considers why it took scientists so many centuries to grasp genetics. | Lit Hub Science

• “There are real men in 2021 who think that women use books as props to ensnare them as if they were falling prey to Marian the Librarian.” Sophie Vershbow on White Lotus, condescension, and Inf*n*te J*st. | Lit Hub

• “Queer Love, it turns out, is everything True Love wishes it could be.” Jen Winston on the True Love industrial complex and the rejuvenating power of queerness. | Lit Hub

• After the Tree of Life shooting, Mark Oppenheimer asks what Squirrel Hill can teach us about resilience and the power of proximity. | Lit Hub

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• Larry Lockridge reveals the story behind The Snake Pit, Mary Jane Ward’s dark comic masterpiece. | Lit Hub Criticism

• “Literature holds no technical secrets, or at least secrets that can’t be plumbed by a gifted amateur.” Wisława Szymborska recommends learning to write from life. | Lit Hub Craft

• INTERVIEW WITH AN INDIE PRESS: Heyday Books editors talk about justice-oriented books and the intersection of publishing and environmental stewardship. | Lit Hub

• New titles from Jonathan Franzen, Miriam Toews, Val McDermid, and David Sedaris all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Welcome to Pillow-Cat Books, “the first animal-focused bookshop in New York.” | The New York Times

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• Elisabeth Becker describes reading the work of German Jewish intellectuals and finding a “sense of belonging, of being at home in my uncertain and questioning self.” | Tablet

• Reconsidering the literary ethics of W. G. Sebald. | The Atlantic

• How A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle highlights “the ways in which [John] Coltrane’s understanding of his masterwork had evolved.” | NYRB

• Saraciea J. Fennell, founder of the Bronx is Reading, talks about building community through literature. | Remezcla

• Lincoln Michel considers the legal and ethical issues at play when a writer fictionalizes real life. | Counter Craft

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• “So many things pull us away from a mutual project of the left.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the necessity of social transformation. | Public Books

Also on Lit Hub: Manan Ahmed Asif on political forgetting and erasure in India • Julie Sedivy on learning and losing language • Read from Clare Chamber’s latest novel, Small Pleasures