Lit Hub Daily: September 11, 2019

• “To this day, the name Hotel Barba fills me with dread and nostalgia.” Dina Nayeri on returning to the hotel-turned-refugee-camp of her childhood. | Lit Hub
• Rural white voters are not a monolith: Christopher Ingraham on the importance of understanding purple America. | Lit Hub
• “Cancer isn’t a great equalizer, but it does make the inequalities of this earth apparent.” Natalie Adler on Anne Boyer’s The Undying. | Lit Hub
• Mediums, psychics, and Tarot readings on book tour: Laura van den Berg on her family’s drive to see the unseeable. | Lit Hub
• Nicholas Lehmann tells the story of community activist Earl Johnson, and the struggle for local progress amid global economic collapse. | Lit Hub
• A reading series that puts San Diego on the literary map: how Last Exit attracts touring authors to a city that most skip. | Lit Hub
• “Writers—like any other human beings—need community more than they do a sense of personal legend.” What incarcerated writers want the literary community to understand. | Lit Hub
• “The world could split open like a flower in bloom, like a woman shattering the glass that had separated her from true connection.” Rebecca Fisseha on #MeToo in Ethiopia and Eritrea. | Lit Hub
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Jess Bergman on the brilliance of Middlemarch, Muriel Spark, and Dorothy Edwards. | Book Marks
• “If crime fiction reflects society, what can books published during wartime tell us about ourselves?” James R. Benn looks at how crime writers did (or didn’t) address World War II. | CrimeReads
• “You say you’re hungry, and the shef peers over his three chins down at you and says Comrade, you’re the backbone of the revolution”: On Dambudzo Marechera, the Zimbabwean writer and iconoclast who was Mugabe’s nemesis. | Quartz
• A group of librarians and archivists are working to digitize the millions of books that are secretly in the public domain, proving once again that librarians are the best. | Vice
• American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher will receive a lifetime achievement award at this year’s National Book Awards. | The Bookseller
• Want to support small presses this fall? Here are 18 books from indie publishers that deserve your attention. | BuzzFeed News
• “If only as a critique of late capitalism, A Confederacy of Dunces uncannily identifies the deep ennui that accompanies today’s rat race.” On John Kennedy Toole, 50 years after his death. | Public Books
• “A man in a paper chef’s hat is very rapidly making a great pile of fried eggs. I am not sure when or whether he’ll stop.” Patti Yumi Cottrell and Jesse Ball in conversation. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: On writing the apocalypse from a crow’s perspective: Reading Women talk to Kira Jane Buxton • On Otherppl, Josh Gondelman on the importance of knowing your audience • Canon vs. anti-cannon: So Many Damn Books go back to school • The humble origins of the man who discovered dark matter • Five questions for Emma Donoghue • Read an excerpt from Honey, I Killed the Cats.