April 15 – April 19, 2024 ‹ Literary Hub

TODAY: In 1912, Bram Stoker dies.  

• “Darryl Lorenzo Wellington was for two years the sixth poet laureate of Santa Fe. He also sold his plasma to get by.” Alissa Quart on writers and the false promises of American opportunity in the first installment of a six part collaboration with Dirt. | Lit Hub
• Adam Kuper on how German anthropologist Gustav Klemm’s racial theories influenced the Nazis: “Klemm’s theory of cultural history was conceived on a grand scale, but it was an amalgam of ideas that were current in educated, liberal circles at the time.” | Lit Hub History
• “You are not the Messiah.” Steve Almond on writer’s block and egoless prose. | Lit Hub Craft
• Matthew D. Lassiter on suburban moralizing, racialized, victimhood, and the war on drugs. | CrimeReads 
• Jay Caspian Kang considers what phones are doing to reading. | The New Yorker
• “While Anderson’s text offers a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, then, it speaks little to the guises in which nationalism has reappeared in the twenty-first century.” Samuel Clowes Huneke reads Imagined Communites in a new age of nationalism. | The New Republic
• “Byron researchers usually face an overabundance of material, but his queerness is still a question of fragments.” On uncovering queerness in the letters of Lord Byron. | The Conversation
• Édouard Louis considers adaptation and argues against “a restrictive idea of identity as a property some of us own.” | Jacobin
• “Like many Palestinians, Saleem had never been to the place he came from.” Marcello Di Cintio remembers Saleem al-Naffar, the beloved poet who was killed in Gaza in December. | PEN Canada
• Simon van Zuylen-Wood attends the book party for Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. | New York Magazine
• A leaked New York Times memo regarding Gaza instructs journalists not to use the word genocide, among other directions. | The Intercept
• On generational differences in literary community, and how BookTok altered a regular book club hosted by an indie book shop in Montreal. | Public Books
• Book translators are concerned about the impact of AI on their livelihoods. | The Guardian
• Kate Dwyer interviews Anne Carson: “A person is a prism, you know, and concepts just flash from this to that from day to day.” | The Paris Review
• “What he fears most are his own experiences, their seeming difference or marginal placement in the culture…” An examination of Garrett Hongo’s poetry. | JSTOR Daily
• An interview with the editors of the New York War Crimes, the protest publication standing in opposition to the New York Times and its coverage of Gaza. | The Baffler
• “It may well be the case that Taubes intends to disorient the reader; it is also possible that the effect arises from artistic indecision.” Huda Awan considers the work of Susan Taubes. | New Left Review
• Comics writers, historians, and scholars remember the late comics seller and historian Robert Beerbohm. | The Comics Journal
• Theater artist Annie Dorsen talks artificial intelligence, language, and rebuilding a lost play by Aeschylus. | Public Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Britain’s generations-long search for the Northwest Passage • How Barbara Comyns wrote her way to The Juniper Tree • Henry Hemming on Bloody Sunday, Frank Hegarty, and life in the IRA •  America, China, and the future of revolutionary rule • Why we don’t talk about money in novels anymore • What we can learn from Palestinian journalists in Gaza • Brianna Pastor on the bittersweet experience of writing about grief and shame • Elwin Cotman on rereading Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York • Lissa Soep on giving a voice to the words of others • Carl Sagan, alien equations, and how sci-fi can help us imagine extraterrestrial life • The literary and romantic camaraderie between Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon • Six writers on working in the service industry • Christine Ma-Kellams considers television as a writing teacher • SJ Kim on writing about and through displacement • The long tradition of men misdiagnosing women •  David Hill reflects on writing as labor • Ethel Rohan on writing about grief • Are you the literary asshole? • Suzanne Scanlon on remembering and returning to a disappearing past • Why the elderly are the best customers for a bookseller • Contours of grief in the aftermath of a family tragedy • Ryan Chapman on wants, needs, money, and time • Julia Alvarez on falling in love with writing again • What does Lord Byron have in common with Che Guevara? • Paul Yamazaki of City Lights reflects on the joys of running an independent bookstore • Where’s the best place to write? • How Lydia Ernestine Becker was essential to–and then excluded from–the study of botany