Lit Hub Daily: September 20, 2021

• “With Tišma, there is nothing ludic; his is a world beyond pleasure, beyond distraction.” David Rieff on Aleksandar Tišma’s third Holocaust novel, Kapo. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• Talk that plays like tennis: Dan O’Brien has some thoughts on how characters should speak. | Lit Hub Craft

• Nathaniel Philbrick retraces the steps of George Washington’s incognito presidential tour to Long Island. | Lit Hub History

• “We had death threats. The kids were told that they were never going to get into college.” Dave Zirin on the first high school team to take a knee. | Lit Hub Sports

• Steven Reign on using research and documentary poetry to tell the real story of David Acer and AIDS panic in 1990s Florida. | Lit Hub

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• Aruni Kashyap on his introduction to and appreciation for the testimonio genre, a tool for “challenging the modern colonial state.” | Lit Hub Craft

• Native Son, 2666, Don Quixote, and more rapid-fire book recs from Héctor Tobar. | Book Marks

• “These stories have survived the centuries because of their enduring appeal to something fundamental about our human nature.” On the pleasures of mythological reimaginings. | Esquire

• Here are 75 queer and feminist books to read this fall. | Autostraddle

• On the eroticism of Sally Rooney’s novels. | The Cut

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• Dylan Onderdonk-Snow considers death and the divine in Knausgaard’s recent work. | Soft Punk

• Teresa Carmody discusses how to define autotheory, which can take the form of “performance, image, photography, video, or digital practice.” | LARB

• Dig into the history of bookmobiles with these photos from The New York Times’ archive. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: On Robert Indiana and his LOVE-hate relationship with the sculpture that made him a star · A poem by Joan Naviyuk Kane · Read from Natasha Brown’s debut novel, Assembly