The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1886, Hilda Doolittle, a poet and leader of the Imagist movement who used H.D. as her pseudonym, is born.
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Ann Beattie in praise of the great Chef James Haller, whose lessons in cooking apply just as seamlessly to life. | Lit Hub Food
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“It’s the kind of energy that just might change your life.” In praise of Martha Cooper’s exhilarating photos of 1980s NYC graffiti. | Lit Hub Photography
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Law of the Tongue: When humans and killer whales hunt together. | Lit Hub
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Brian McDonald recounts the riots and rivalries that led to the birth of the New York City Fire Department. | Lit Hub History
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Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, and Edward Enninful’s A Visible Man all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
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Martin Edwards presents a host of crime novels featuring libraries, bookshops, the publishing industry, and the world of collecting. | CrimeReads
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“What’s the difference between education and indoctrination?” Jeffrey Aaron Snyder looks at the long dispute over what to teach in public schools. | The Point
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Julie R. Enszer pays tribute to six lesbian feminist writers of the South who, with their work, “created a place to struggle and a place to engage and reimagine.” | The Bitter Southerner
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“In the last several years of contemporary literature, there has existed alongside the relentlessly good character a spicier alternative: the relentlessly bad character.” Kate Shannon Jenkins considers the decline of the redemption arc in contemporary literature. | Gawker
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Clare Thorp delves into new books that explore female desire. | BBC
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Remembering Barbara Ehrenreich, whose books focused on the “overlooked and the forgotten” of society. | The New York Times
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Masiyaleti Mbewe on the state of millennial fiction from African writers. | LARB
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Neil McRobert ranked all 75 Stephen King books. | Esquire
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Considering the perils of seeking life advice from philosophers. | The Point
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“You can be a gun person involuntarily. At least that’s what I find myself wanting to tell people.” Andrew Howard on active-shooter training and gun violence in America. | Guernica
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“Could anything more tragic than this befall those writers — a dispersion that may never come together again?” Homeira Qaderi on the state of Afghan literature under Taliban rule. | Los Angeles Review of Books
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Librarians talk to Madeleine Carlile about how book bans are putting their funding and collections at risk. | TIME
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Erin Blakemore tracks the history of book censorship in the United States. | National Geographic
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Je Banach on the books whose introductions offer special insight into literary classics, from Brandon Taylor on Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction to Sally Rooney on Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays. | The Atlantic
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“One of the reasons I wrote that book was because I kept noticing things that made me think, ‘Didn’t we do this? Aren’t we over this already?’” James Hannaham talks about blending tragedy with absurdity. | Interview
Also on Lit Hub:
Syllabi and reading lists from ten of our favorite writer-educators • 22 novels you need to read this fall, according to us • Rabih Alameddine on rereading books and being a lazy bum • Eileen Myles on the “pictorial, geometric, pagan” photos of Justin Kimball • The Rings of Power gives us yet another abdicated royal • Michael Frank on receiving (and writing) the story of a remarkable life • On Hannah Arendt and complicity • Cary Johnson on the new, new Black Gay Renaissance • How “Love Commandos” are helping young lovers in India cross caste lines • Why Carolyn Hays wrote her memoir under a pen name • How a nuclear site in Washington State poisoned its own employees • Cai Emmons on losing her voice to ALS • Was Benghazi a single factor or a game-changer in the 2016 election? • Alice Wong on prophetic poetry and processing pain • Jessa Crispin on the complicated relationship between Kansans and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood • Exploring the inner lives of animals in fiction • How theater plays into climate change activism • On Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors, one of the cheapest Hollywood films ever made • A plea for practical commitment to our planet • The long history of women’s tennis attire attracting fashion drama • How Christianity led to the rise of capitalism in Medieval Europe
