Literary Hub - Lit Hub Daily: January 20, 2021

Lit Hub Daily
January 20, 2021

TODAY: In 1961, Robert Frost recites his poem, “The Greatest Gift,” at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. He intended to recite a poem he’d written for the occasion, “Dedication,” but the sun reflecting off the snow-covered ground made reading the poem too difficult so Frost he recited “The Greatest Gift” from memory instead.

Read every presidential inauguration poem ever performed (there are fewer than you think). | The Hub
To write about the first woman M.D. in America, Janice P. Nimura decided to shadow another doctor... while they delivered a baby. | Lit Hub
Sorry to break it to you, but scientists don’t really know if dogs actually dream. | Lit Hub Science
Jonathon Lichtenstein reflects on intergenerational trauma as he travels through Berlin with his father, who escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport. | Lit Hub History
Paula Hawkins on Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, 70 years later. | CrimeReads
The Haunting of Hill House, The Yellow Wallpaper, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and more rapid-f ire book recs from Camilla Bruce. | Book Marks
Four people who weren’t surprised by the disaster of the last four years: Trump’s biographers. | Politico
“We imagine an impossible / America and call one another / A fool for doing so.” A poem for the day by Jericho Brown. | New York Times Magazine
Manners, literature, imagination, reality itself: Charles Yu, Eileen Myles, Lauren Oyler, and others discuss life after Trump. | Harper’s
“My real identity, the one that follows me around like a migraine, is that I am the daughter of immigrants. As such, I have some skills of my own.” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on waking up from the American Dream. | The New Yorker
“How did an entire subgenre of literature spring up around a few thousand rich people who lived during the 1810s?” On the origins of the modern Regency romance. | JSTOR Daily
Ibram X. Kendi recommends 10 of 2020’s best political books by Black women. | The Atlantic
“The idea is, we act consciously on the page and in life.” Zan Romanoff talks to Matthew Salesses about writing, revision, and remaking the workshop. | Hazlitt
“There are forces at work in the publishing industry that don’t want these books to succeed.” A roundtable on experimental and marginalized work. | Full Stop
“The word was a badge that had been pinned to me, only I hadn’t earned it, and had no interest in doing so.” Emily Rapp Black on being called “resilient” after loss. | Lit Hub Memoir
How the sewing machine and the camera empowered African women to create their own stories—and fashion—after colonialism. | Lit Hub History
Rachel Gable on the “hidden curriculum of tacit norms and rules” that first-generation college students must navigate. | Inside Higher Ed