Lit Hub Daily: Writing a Book That Your Parents Won’t Read

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Lit Hub Daily

“By the time I was born, the city had been conquered thrice, by the British, the Japanese, and the military junta. Three enemies to symbolize the three torments of the mind.” Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint on war, reincarnation, and the changing names of Myanmar. | Lit Hub Memoir

Jeffrey Webb revisits the battle for Blair Mountain, “a reminder that those of us in coal country do not always vote against our own interests.” | Lit Hub History

Michelle Jana Chan muses on the sting of (lovingly) writing a novel that her father has yet to read. | Lit Hub

“If you’re looking for them, there are also plenty of clues in the book that she would only be ‘the girl next door’ if you lived in a gated community.” Sarah Jaffe considers class and privilege in female comedians’ memoirs. | Lit Hub

Richard Barnett revisits Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “the most formidably opaque work of modern philosophy.” | Lit Hub Criticism

Kia Corthron delves into the syntactical challenge of historical fiction. | Lit Hub

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Peter Heller’s The Guide, and Deborah Levy’s Real Estate all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

“My favorite books capture something tangibly and often uncomfortably real.” Author and clinical psychologist S. F. Kosa on the best psychological thrillers. | CrimeReads

On Keen On, Steve Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro discuss the global epidemic of irrational thinking. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

“If we want to salvage feminism, you have to remove white racial privilege.” Rafia Zakaria on how race and racism shape modern feminism. | Salon

Tomi Adeyemi on the books that have made a memorable impact on her personal and creative life. | Elle

Hilma Wolitzer discusses writing in the wake of her husband’s death from COVID-19. You can read her story “The Last Story in a Long Marriage” here. | Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature

“The book is both arrival and departure, for both author and readers.” Susan Choi revisits Sigrid Nunez’s 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God. | The Paris Review

Kira Jane Buxton on her new novel, protecting the environment, and predicting the future through fiction. | Chicago Review of Books

The librarian of an Illinois high school discovered a copy of the rare, 75-year-old issue of The New Yorker that contained John Hersey’s groundbreaking reporting on the bombing of Hiroshima. | The New Yorker

From the Chelsea Hotel to Gumby Book Studio and more: dive into the history of New York City’s legendary literary hangouts. | The New York Times

These authors are working to bring more Afro Latinx stories to children’s literature. | CNN

In this stunning follow-up to Hollow Kingdom, the animal kingdom’s “favorite apocalyptic hero” is back with a renewed sense of hope for humanity, ready to take on a world ravaged by a viral pandemic (Helen Macdonald). Start reading now.

Patricia Engel talks to Mitchell Kaplan about the natural human instinct to migrate, on The Literary Life. 

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Matt Bell in praise of genre agnosticism, on New Books Network. 

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Jose Hernandez Diaz on the surrealism of prose poetry, on The Common.

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