February 14, 2024 ‹ Literary Hub

TODAY: In 1989, Salman Rushdie has a fatwa placed on his head by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for The Satanic Verses, a book Khomeini condemned as blasphemous.

• Bruna Dantas Lobato’s notes on translating Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin: “Part of me would love for the issues in this book to be simpler, less painful.” | Lit Hub Craft

• “Throughout the eighteenth century…Chinese tea remained the British East India Company’s prime source of revenue, much of which was used to finance British colonial expansion.” Amitav Ghosh examines the colonial history of the tea trade. | Lit Hub History
• “Would it make me feel any better to know that our ghosts were still there?  I can’t check anyway. I know this space belongs to someone else now.” Emma Dries recalls a childhood above the Fulton Fish Market. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Lucy Sante on the experience of transitioning: “Now that I have opened Pandora’s box, I cannot close it again, but have no idea what to do with the specters it has let loose. The idea of transitioning is endlessly seductive and endlessly terrifying.” | Lit Hub Memoir
• What did past presidents write to their wives? Love letters, it turns out. | Lit Hub History
• “Independence came and left. Colonisation left and came. Harry came and left. It was we who killed Harry.” Read from Kobby Ben Ben’s new novel, No One Dies Yet. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “Yet writing centers, at their core, were created during times of crisis. Only, the crisis then was about “unprepared” students rather than the myriad challenges we face in higher education today.” On college campus writing centers. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• A series of candy hearts, courtesy of Cormac McCarthy. | McSweeny’s 
• The Autauga-Prattville Library board bans LGBTQ+ books for those under the age of seventeen. | Book Riot
• “It’s vital living in a democracy that students are exposed to ideas, are allowed to think critically and hear voices that aren’t their own.” Khaled Hosseini addresses book bans in the US. | The Guardian 
• “I became fascinated by Russian poetry, and in particular by the charismatic and sexy Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.” Merve Emre interviews Sophie Pinkham. | New York Review of Books
• Kelly Link talks to Adam Morgan about the utility of deadlines, capturing place, and “nighttime logic.” | Esquire