Lit Hub Daily: September 20, 2022

TODAY: In 1849, Honoré de Balzac travels to Poland to meet Eveline Hanska, whom he will marry shortly before his death the following year.

• Tracing Marcella Hazan’s winding journey to culinary stardom. (Plus, her roast chicken recipe!) | Lit Hub Food

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• It’s a banner week for new books—here are 15 dropping today, featuring new titles from Yiyun Li, Elizabeth Strout, and Andrew Sean Greer. | The Hub

• “This book, then, is the equivalent of a literary phoenix—rare, thrilling, one of a kind.” Maggie O’Farrell considers Elspeth Barker’s modern Scottish classic, O Caledonia. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Laura Warrell on falling in love with—and staying devoted to—the “dying” art form of jazz. | Lit Hub Music

• Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan discuss doubt, wonder, and a lifetime of religious searching. | Lit Hub Religion

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• “Women have a special relationship with the law, because the next best alternative is violence.” Dahlia Lithwick on working within the legal system to demand justice. | Lit Hub Politics

• How Gavin McInnes, spewing “a bottomless helping of repellent ideology,” founded the Proud Boys. | Lit Hub Politics

• Lamar Giles on social horror in fact and fiction. | CrimeReads

• In the new issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Rachel Cline reflects on the final days of her mother’s life. | Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

• “A side effect of reading Horowitz’s puppy book is that you may start searching for opportunities to use some of the puppy-science vocabulary in casual conversation.” Rivka Galchen on the (adorable) revelations from the new book The Year of the Puppy. | The New Yorker

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• Terrance Hayes recommends soundtracks for most any occasion—in the form of a poem. | The Paris Review

• “It helps to know what kind of a writer you are.” Jasmine Guillory and Nicole Chung on navigating a creative career. | The Atlantic

• Jenny Bhatt asks 20 vital questions for emerging and established translators: “Do you connect with and uplift other translators?” | We Are All Translators

• “I think part of coping with rejection means accepting that maybe it isn’t random.” Anna Dorn on looking at rejection in hindsight. | LARB

• “It is our nature to grow through challenge and stimulation, to experiment, to expand our horizons because we sense that to stay the same is to become stagnant.” Retired teacher Chuck Keller explains why banning books never works. | The Courier-Journal

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Also on Lit Hub: Hafizah Augustus Geter on Blackness as a world of possibility • How to stock your pantry with all the essentials • Read from Meghan Gilliss’s debut novel, Lungfish

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