Lit Hub Daily: September 5, 2024
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1957, On the Road is published.
- “I’ve never felt the presence of my own death so close to me,” writes Nahil Mohana while chronicling the toll of living with endless displacement and fear in Gaza. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Shannon Bowring asks, “How do you create a written world that honors the spirit of the place that inspired it while still allowing it to become its own universe?” | Lit Hub Craft
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Here’s the shortlist for the 2024 Cundill History Prize. | Lit Hub
Article continues after advertisement - “The men in her fiction are black holes who threaten to extinguish the light of any woman or child unlucky enough to get near them.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Harald Jähner considers how hyperinflation impacted gender relations in Weimar Germany. | Lit Hub History
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Alice Driver shares the stories of the immigrants who risked their lives at a meatpacking plant during COVID and discusses her book, Life and Death of the American Worker. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Should we consider math a language? Ben Orlin considers new ways to think about—and have fun with—numbers, variables and equations. | Lit Hub Humor
- Maureen Sun makes a case for embracing the fictiveness of fiction: “Even photographs aren’t unmediated documents.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- “What did he hope to accomplish, using his considerable power merely to knock me down? Why would a teacher ever speak to a student this way?” Michele Herman argues in favor of a more generous pedagogy. | Lit Hub Craft
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Korean revolutionary Kim San on courage in the face of imperialism: “To rise above oppression is the glory of man; to submit is his shame.” | Lit Hub History
- “Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Willy-Brandt-Straße 1, 10557 Berlin—that was the address he wrote down…” Read from László Krasznahorkai’s novel, Herscht 07769. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “Conifers transform to dark green the lands that for millennia appeared as flat expanses and gentle hills of uninterrupted tawny.” Sarah Smarsh on an existential threat to North American prairies: trees. | Orion
- What’s the cost of refusing to sell out? Kelli Korducki talks to the activist-academic Silvia Federici. | Hazlitt
- Brat summer might be over, but it lives on in literature. | The New Yorker
- “Literary theory can be either avant-garde or lyric, a tool for stepping back from the world or for more fully inhabiting it.” On the present state of studying literature. | Public Books
- Take a deep dive into the NaNoWriMo AI drama. | Wired
- The Internet Archive has lost its appeal to lend ebooks. | The Verge
