Lit Hub Daily: March 14, 2024

Lit Hub Daily

March 14

TODAY: In 1887 Sylvia Beach, American-French publisher and founder of the Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, is born.

"In order to speak we first have to prove that we're one of the good ones. The tame ones. Tame not only in nature, but also in language." Lana Bastašić in conversation with John Freeman on language, solidarity with Palestine, and being a "perpetual outsider." | Lit Hub In Conversation
"It's not an exaggeration to say that the tardigrade holds secrets that could offer salvation from the effects of climate change." Daniel Lewis on insects preserved in amber, and what they have to teach us. | Lit Hub Science
Why are literary retellings essential? "The best re-imagined stories address what is inconsistent about the original text and make it unmissable." | Lit Hub Criticism
Avril Horner on the Barbara Comyns novel that got too real: "Barbara insisted on the book being prefaced by a sentence that reads: 'The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty.'" | Lit Hub Criticism
Sometimes, the online recipe scene likes to crank up the heat. Geraldine DeRuiter examines the state of internet food discourse. | Lit Hub Food
"It unfurls like a controlled detonation, rich with wonder and catharsis." 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
"My Ah Ma told me all the time that she loved me. Though I don't know if you would call 'love' what she called 'love'." Read from Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's new novel, But the Girl.| Lit Hub Fiction
"A quail's cry is always a message of great urgency." Read an extract from Amy Tan's backyard bird diary. | The Paris Review
Bach, Don Quixote, and 2001: revisiting Tarkovsky's Solaris. | Reactor
"When I got to graduate school, a PhD program in history, I was taking classes on the history of gay rights that were written from what I considered to be a metropolitan perspective." Bathsheba Demuth interviews Gabriel Rosenberg. | Public Books
Claire Messud reflects on Virginia Woolf's nearly-century-old essays from the archives of The Yale Review. | The Yale Review
"I started to wonder about American literature more systematically—what was structuring it, what the world of economics was doing to the aesthetics of the novel." Dan Sinykin talks publishers, fiction, and academic Twitter. | The Millions
Joseph Koch is shuttering his legendary comics warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. He and Zach Rabiroff discuss comics history, changing neighborhoods, and what comes next. | The Comics Journal
"The full-throated endorsement of Israel by far-right figures like Javier Milei of Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and its patronage by countries where white nationalists have infected political life…suggests that the world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law is receding." Pankaj Mishra on Palestine, Hindu nationalism, and what comes next. | London Review of Books