Lit Hub Daily: September 17, 2019

TODAY: In 1968, writer Cheryl Strayed, who was played by Reese Witherspoon in the adaptation of her memoir Wild, is born.

• COVERING CLIMATE NOW: This week, we’re featuring work on the past, present, and future of the climate crisis as part of a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets. Today: Anna Merlan on the dark and dangerous world of climate conspiracy theories • Leah Penniman on Indigenous storytelling and the future of farming. | Lit Hub
• “My first library was a library of porn.” Brian Bouldrey wanders through the “smutty old Times Square” of literature. | Lit Hub
• “The poets and marketplaces that have invented our dictionaries have not—when it comes to suffering—done the necessary work.” Anne Boyer on the language of pain. | Lit Hub
• In which Josh Gondelman entreats the fashion industry to stop trying to make Dad Shoes cool. | Lit Hub
• No drama like 17th-century poet drama: on the snarky poem that got its author murdered (via poison enema?!). | Lit Hub
• On the haunted lives of girls and women: Rachel Eve Moulton considers how horror is housed in the body. | Lit Hub
• “There is no single word in any other language that means the same thing as the Welsh hiraeth, which I’m told is a refusal to surrender what has already been lost.” Of sisterly bonds and translating the untranslatable. | Lit Hub
• Here’s the Young People’s Literature Longlist for the 2019 National Book Awards. | The Hub
• Brad Gooch recommends five great books of spiritual poetry, from Emily Dickenson to Rainer Maria Rilke. | Book Marks
• “Dean Heller (R-NV) weeps in the strong embrace of Mark Warner (D-VA), torn between his desire for moderation and his fear of a primary challenge.” On the strange political power of congressional fan fiction. | Longreads
• Scholars believe they have identified John Milton’s annotated edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio. | The Guardian
• Rimbaud tourism is a cottage industry in the poet’s hometown of Charleville-Mézières (which he described as “exceptionally stupid” and “hideous”). | The New York Times
• “It was difficult to monetize my blackness”: read a profile of screenwriter-turned-novelist (turned-screenwriter/novelist) Attica Locke. | The Washington Post
• The Writers for Migrant Justice collective was established earlier this year by four poets to resist the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Here’s the story of the group’s rapid success. | i-D
• What happens when you put a Baz Luhrmann-esque aesthetic, Wiz Khalifa, and Apple TV+ together? An Emily Dickinson show for our times, apparently. | MacRumors
• Marie-Claire Blais is “one of the most distinctive and original living writers of fiction.” Why don’t more Americans read her? | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub: Kevin Barry on the need to sustain our literature • Imani Perry and Mitchell Jackson in conversation • Read an excerpt from Alix E. Harrow’s new novel The Ten Thousand Doors of January. 

 

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