Lit Hub Daily: September 28, 2022

TODAY: In 1970, American novelist John Dos Passos dies at 74.    

• “I am writing this as an act of love.” Indian writers reflect on 75 years of independence and partition. | Lit Hub History

• Why so many of us experience arachnophobia (and a few scientific ways to get rid of it). | Lit Hub Science

• Series creator David Milch explains all that filthy language—delivered in iambic pentamer—in Deadwood. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• “Dark academia fuels itself, a snake eating its own tail, a fractal monster that can never be meta enough for its own satisfaction.” A Wikipedia entry of Adrienne Raphel’s own dark academia. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Margaret A. Burnham considers how the law of Jim Crow still hovers over the 21st century. | Lit Hub Politics

• The defense of self-defense: Elsa Dorlin traces the legal history of the right to bear arms. | Lit Hub History

• The staff of Coach House Books talks about publishing the unexpected, adventurous, and exceptional. | Lit Hub

• Kelly J. Ford searches for contemporary Southern women writers. | CrimeReads

• “We created technology that our morality and our idea of life isn’t equipped for.” Svetlana Alexievich talks about the legacy of Chernobyl. | LARB

• Agate Publishing president Doug Seibold shares some thoughts about how a bestseller is born. | Evanston RoundTable

• Read a lyrical short story by Leonard Cohen from the posthumously published The Jukebox Heart. | The Guardian

• “I had thought femininity an inherited prison, when it was in fact a value-neutral technology, available to deploy at will.” Sarah Thankam Mathews on hair and femininity. | SSENSE

• Jason Horowitz explores Giorgia Meloni’s long fascination with The Lord of the Rings. | The New York Times

• “So how does it feel to be a metaphor?” Andrea Long Chu considers half-Asian, half-white protagonists in work by Celeste Ng and Jay Caspian Kang. | Vulture

• Ali Francis breaks down the controversy around a new unauthorized biography of Anthony Bourdain. | Bon Appetit

Also on Lit Hub: The found poems of Goliarda Sapienza • A reading list of fictional diaries • Read from Namwali Serpell’s Latest Novel, The Furrows

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