Lit Hub Daily: September 1, 2023

• “She is an unapologetic maximalist.” Lucy Scholes sheds light on Elizabeth Mavor’s overlooked modern classic, A Green Equinox. | Lit Hub Criticism

• The Changeling, The Other Black Girl, and more of the Literary Film & TV You Need to Stream in September. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Daniel Mendelsohn recounts teaching The Odyssey to a group of undergrads—and his 81-year-old father: “I worried that my students had, in the end, been put off by his gruff attitude toward the text and confused by his evident disdain for my teaching of it.” | Lit Hub Memoir

• A reading list of mothers and daughters trying to get it right, brought to you by Jill Talbot. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Crossword sonnets, golden spades, and copped stanzas abound in September’s crop of new poetry books. | Lit Hub Poetry

• Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Patti Hartigan’s August Wilson: A Life, and Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting all feature among August’s best reviewed books. | Book Marks

• “Kafka’s blunt declarations do more than bemoan his lapses in progress. They also express, with melodramatic flair, his feelings of entrapment.” Charlie Tyson on Kafka’s diaries. | Bookforum (!)

• Mitch Therieau considers the soundtrack of CVS. | The Paris Review

• “I am coming back to America. I am trying to figure out the act of being American again.” A.V. Marraccini on Ansel Adams, Lana Del Rey, Walt Whitman, NFTs, and more. | Cleveland Review of Books

• John Green discusses book bans in his home state of Indiana. | New York Times

• “Ingalls’s female protagonists share an instinctive faith that, no matter how disappointing their men are, better ones are out there.” Lily Meyer explores the hetero-optimism of Rachel Ingalls’s characters. | NYRB

Also on Lit Hub: September’s best sci-fi & fantasy books • Read from Johanna Hedman’s newly translated novel, The Trio (tr. Kira Josefsson)