Lit Hub Daily: September 17, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1903, Frank O’Connor is born.
- Anne Sebba chronicles how the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz survived the death camps and considers the role of music amidst genocide. | Lit Hub History
- Jerome Charyn recommends books that capture the art of defining a diva by Joyce Carol Oates, Josephine Baker, Allegra Kent, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “Her best works—across mediums—came from ceding control, allowing herself to become a ‘conduit’ for the unknown.” On the life and career of abstract artist Emily Mason. | Lit Hub Art
- Jeremy B. Jones highlights titles about complicated families by Rick Bragg, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Crystal Wilkinson and others. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Trymaine Lee on finding meaning in Black survival: “A blood clot and a bullet are very different things. But both have the ability to take and twist a life.” | Lit Hub Politics
- Read “The Body of Grief as Rice and Butter,” a poem by Alison Lubar from the collection The Other Tree: “A body, from a body, from a body, from a body. Trans-generational grief engenders both tenderness and bitterness.” | Lit Hub Poetry
- “My dream had seemed so real that I found it hard to dismiss it as one, even though that was the simplest and most logical explanation, and the one I eventually found myself obliged to accept.” Read from Rie Qudan’s novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo, translated by Jesse Kirkwood. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Ninety-one-year-old author Maureen Duffy is the inaugural winner of the RSL Pioneer Prize, an award funded by Bernardine Evaristo, which honors British women writers over 60. | The Guardian
- “When I find a garment that has the magic, that makes me the person I aspire to be, I cling and refuse to let go.” Rachel Kushner contemplates yearning and style. | The New Yorker
- Matthew Wills looks at the origins of the word “vampire” and representations of the undead across cultures and mythologies. | JSTOR Daily
- The photojournalists who document destruction in Gaza discuss risking their lives for the truth. | The Intercept
- Anthony Curtis Adler looks at a new translation of Walter Benjamin’s On Goethe. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Journalists Óscar Martínez and Carlos Martínez on being forced to leave Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador. | The Dial
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