LitHub Daily: February 3, 2017

TODAY:  In 1909, philosopher and activist Simone Weil is born. 

• 16 books you should read in February (to survive this longest of winters). | Literary Hub
• How Donald Trump has made it hard to be a New England Patriots fan. | Literary Hub
• 10 essential football essays to read ahead of this Sunday’s Superbowl. | Literary Hub
• Mike Scalise on life with a rare medical condition (and joining the ranks of the illness memoirists).  | Literary Hub
• “While Ralph Waldo Emerson and other white writers were fretting about what a new American literature might look like, Douglass was busy producing it.” On the truly “amazing job” done by Frederick Douglass. | The Washington Post
• Gary Shteyngart, Karan Mahajan, Joyce Carol Oates, and other New Yorker contributors share the books they’re turning to now. | The New Yorker
• “Poets are diamond polishers. But there are also collectors of raw diamonds—I am a good archaeologist.” Ben Lerner interviews Alexander Kluge. | The Paris Review
• “People talk about the terror of the blank page, and knock wood, I have no idea what they’re talking about.” A profile of John Darnielle, Mountain Goats frontman and author of The Universal Harvester. | Publishers Weekly
• For me the point of writing is to make myself as a writer completely absent: Speaking with Eimear McBride. | Electric Literature
• “There is one real difficulty, which is that his books are hard to talk about, even when that’s all you want to do.” Sarah Nicole Prickett on Henry Green. | Bookforum
•  “The love I carried was books. Exceptional books. Books by black authors, their photos often the only black faces I would talk to for weeks.” Rahawa Haile on reading her way through the Appalachian Trail. | BuzzFeed Reader

 

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