Lit Hub Daily: September 13, 2022

• “If you were to read for 16 hours a day at 300 words per minute, you could keep up with a world containing an average population of 100,000 living Harper Lees.” Randall Munroe answers a pressing question: Was it ever possible for one person to read every book ever written (in English)? | Lit Hub History

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• Speaking of which, here are 24 glorious new books out this week. | The Hub

• “I tend to keep circling back to where I used to be.” Ling Ma talks to Jane Ciabattari about the surreal and the sublime, her new story collection, and how Severance has outgrown her. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• Jhumpa Lahiri considers “the fruit of the union” between author and translator, as illustrated by Michael F. Moore’s translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. | Lit Hub On Translation

• The tactics of conspiracy: Sarah Kendzior on Trumpland’s criminal distortions of American reality. | Lit Hub Politics

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• 5 WRITERS, 7 QUESTIONS, NO WRONG ANSWERS: A.M. Homes, Hua Hsu, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri,  Chelsea Martin, and Steve Stern go behind the scenes of their new books. | Lit Hub

• “Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us.” William Faulkner’s 1952 review of The Old Man and the Sea. | Book Marks

• Rijula Das on the language of brutality, and why it matters. | CrimeReads

• “Please don’t ban my books in my hometown.” John Green speaks out against proposed book bans in the school district where he was a student. | Vulture

• Jonna Perrillo on the unique dangers posed by the book bans of today. | The Washington Post

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• “The stories, our stories and the stories of the world, are all located within us, around us, and also, importantly, under our waters.” Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor talks about East African history and literature. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• “The limits of a human life—our narrow view on the world, our limited ability to know ourselves and each other, our mortality—were sources of meaning and pleasure for her.” Gabriel Winant remembers Barbara Ehrenreich. | n+1

• Jared Marcel Pollen considers the revolutionary politics of Percy Bysshe Shelley. | Jacobin

• “Queer and trans writers are among our most vital culture creators across every segment of the arts.” An interview with Samiya Bashir, Lambda Literary’s new executive director. | Publishers Weekly

Also on Lit Hub: Matthew Zapruder on poems for dire times • A reading list of experimental points of view • Read a story from T. C. Boyle’s latest collection, I Walk Between the Raindrops