Lit Hub Daily: September 27, 2022

TODAY: In 1855, Alfred Tennyson reads from his new book Maud and other poems at a social gathering in the home of Robert and Elizabeth Browning in London; Dante Gabriel Rossetti makes a sketch of him doing so (see above).   

• “Love and writing are the only two things in the world that I can bear, the rest is darkness.” Read from Annie Ernaux’s lovelorn 1988 diary. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• Why do we overuse (ecstatic!! hyperbolic!!!) language? Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza investigates. | Lit Hub

• The slow decline of glory: What Don Quixote reveals about the Spanish empire at its peak. | Lit Hub History

• Boris Dralyuk considers the work of Isaac Babel, “among the most agile, most energetic prose stylists of his or any other era.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• “The silence I’m looking for is not so much a quality of sound as a state of mind.” Kamila Shamsie on finding the perfect writing space. | Lit Hub

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• Juliet Patterson recommends six books that explore grief poetically. | Lit Hub

• Paradise lost: Annie Proulx on the destruction of the English Fenlands, once “the best-known of their time.” | Lit Hub Climate Change

• Keishel Williams considers Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun: “Because her work gives every perspective a chance, it can make some people uncomfortable.” | PEN America

• “Now I think that things that are artistically good usually have some sort of resonance with things that are ethically good.” Isle McElroy and Torrey Peters talk about cruelty, debuts, and what’s next. | Electric Lit

• Patrick McGinty offers a reading list of Soviet sci-fi to help us understand our claustrophobic present. | The Millions

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• Two hundred years after Jean-François Champollion announced that he’d deciphered it, Allison C. Meier considers the cultural impact of the Rosetta Stone. | JSTOR Daily

• “Expository English is beautiful, or can be. Axios-speak is hideous, and it can’t be anything else.” Timothy Noah on Smart Brevity and the problem with “Axios-ese.” | The New Republic

• Anthony Lane reflects on T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” | The New Yorker

• “Reading these two remarkable books made me freshly grateful for that friendship I once had, and for the ones that have managed to stay true.” Dan Kois considers two new memoirs about platonic male friendship. | Slate

Also on Lit Hub: A conversation with Namwali Serpell • A reading list of collaborative translated literature • Read from Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Shrines of Gaiety

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