Lit Hub Daily: Lauren Groff on Growing Up in What Felt Like the Middle of Nowhere

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Lit Hub Daily

“I want no part of the person I was then, or to be back in the town of those years that made and held me.” Lauren Groff on growing up in what felt like the middle of nowhere. | Lit Hub Freeman’s 

“There is something perhaps a little showy, a little glib...” How was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road first received by critics? | Book Marks 

Living in a Rumi poem: Ari Honarvar on inheriting her mother’s devotion to verse. | Lit Hub Poetry

A George Washington travelogue, a Holocaust story of survival, and a history of Cuba all feature among September’s best reviewed books in history and politics. | Lit Hub

Sound ecologist Bernie Krause in praise of “woodland therapy.” | Lit Hub Nature

“When people die spectacularly, in public and in large numbers, no one quite knows how to pick up the pieces.” Robert A. Jensen considers the aftermath of tragedies. | Lit Hub

In the face of overwhelming climate change, Dave Goulson recommends making your surroundings insect-friendly. | Lit Hub Climate Change

Sophie Ward recommends books with multiple narrators—and thus multiple truths. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

Eight new sci-fi noirs that extrapolate a bleak future from our harsh present. | CrimeReads

WATCH: On Keen On, Kristin Henning talks about the foundations of racist policing in the US · Joseph Weisberg dives deep into the endless cold war between Russia and America. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

Sophie Haigney considers the burgeoning genre of “upbeat, didactic, and unimaginative” children’s books by and about political celebrities. | The Drift

Examining the long, complex history of book censorship in the US. | Teen Vogue

George Abraham describes how language can address an “apocalypse that colonialism has imposed on Indigenous and dispossessed peoples since the beginning of the settler project.” | Guernica

Listen to this joint interview with Isabel Allende and Sandra Cisneros. | NPR

Dave Eggers talks about his sequel to The Circle and the pervasive reality of surveillance in contemporary life. | Publishers Weekly

Namwali Serpell delves into “the fantasy of American race transformation” and the history of “passing” narratives. | The Yale Review

“Please try to notice if every artist isn’t ruthless in some way.” Read an excerpt from Patricia Highsmith’s diaries. | The New Yorker

V.V. Ganeshananthan, J. Robert Lennon, and Catherine Nichols discuss Jamaica Kincaid’s 1990 novel, Lucy, on Lit Century. 

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Marian Crotty performs her short story “Halloween,” on Storybound. 

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So Many Damn Books on choosing not to own that many damn books.

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