Literary Hub - Lit Hub Daily: April 12, 2021

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Lit Hub Daily

Ottessa Moshfegh has a witchy new book slated for next summer, set in a vanished medieval fiefdom. | The Hub

From overinflated to opaque: Jason Guriel on what makes a good author bio, those minor texts with major ambitions. | Lit Hub

“My parents must have always hoped that business would keep the family together, but the stakes of succession cost too much.” Melissa Scholes Young comes to terms with three generations of American Dreaming. | Lit Hub Memoir

Cut off from his home country of Italy during the pandemic, Andrea Bajani takes his family on a road trip to Italy, Texas. | Lit Hub

Natalie Baszile honors the long—and unsung—history of Black and brown farmers and land stewards. | Lit Hub History

Harlem Shuffle, Their Eyes Were Watching God, George and Martha, and more rapid-fire book recs from Emma Straub. | Book Marks

Your week in virtual book events, featuring Maaza Mengiste, Namwali Serpell, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and more. | Lit Hub

Dorris Lessing’s writing in On Cats puts “the boundary between wildness and domesticity” front and center. | Guernica

“While the comedic imitation mode for performing blackness is often rewarded financially, the exhibition/trauma mode for performing blackness is often rewarded by the film industry itself.” Ayanna Thompson considers racial tropes and the white gaze. | Lit Hub Film and TV

Are conservatives so obsessed with raging against the “cancellation” of Dr. Seuss that they’re distracted from doing real harm? (And if so, should we loudly “cancel” more old children’s books?) | The New Republic

“What does social engineering do to our inner lives? It restricts our imagination—and, therefore, our freedom.” Sanjena Sathian explores how the “model minority” myth harms everyone. | Time

How a collector and a curator are trying to trace historic Hebrew typefaces to their creators. | Atlas Obscura 

“African American literature, as a discipline, was never a promise.” Shanna Greene Benjamin pays tribute to Nellie Y. McKay, one of the scholars who fulfilled that promise. | Lit Hub Biography

“I think, looking back, I wanted to act because I did not know myself at all.” Kaitlyn Greenidge considers how acting fueled a journey of self-discovery. |  BuzzFeed News

Olivia Giovetti breaks down the operatic moments—and what they show us—in the movie Promising Young Woman. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Lidia Yuknavitch talks triptychs and centering

peripheral moments, on First Draft. 

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Jacke Wilson offers five ways to read Henry James, on The History of Literature. 

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Listen to Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy perform poems from Rilke’s
The Book of Hours, on Emergence Magazine. 

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Judy Batalion on understanding the Holocaust as

a story of defiance, on Keen On. 

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Andrea Pitzer recounts the heroic—and horrific—arctic voyages
of William Barents, on Time to Eat the Dogs.

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