Lit Hub Daily: February 22, 2024

TODAY: In 1866, Hugo Ball, poet and founder of the Dada movement, was born. 

What’s Aisha Sabatini Sloan reading? Diana Arterian on the author’s nightstand. | Lit Hub Criticism

“The intimacy I feel with what my home once was cannot be reconciled with what downtown has become.” Emma Dries reflects on her childhood home and how 9/11 changed downtown Manhattan forever. | Lit Hub Memoir “Nothing says ‘I can offer sage and sound advice’ like enjoying a literary Big Gulp full of room temperature Pinot Grigio.” Kristen Arnett decides once and for all if you’re the literary asshole. | Lit Hub Craft Lyz Lenz on the inseparable histories of marriage and divorce in the United States. | Lit Hub History “I could turn the question into the next occasion for rumination, narration, and reckoning, and that this wrestling could illuminate something that would have remained invisible otherwise.” Leslie Jamison takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub In Conversation Sometimes, it’s good to argue with yourself. Terry Golway on the importance of exploring opposing ideas: “I’d like to think that kind of open-mindedness has made me a better historian as well as a good journalist.” | Lit Hub Craft “Her work was about my words, but my words only existed through her.” Erica Berry on the relationships that connect reader, writer, and audiobook narrator. | Lit Hub Craft Parul Sehgal on Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, Alexander Chee on Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams, and more. Here are five book reviews you need to read this week. | Lit Hub Reading Lists “The particulars of what had gone wrong, when, how, it’d lingered in him for years. Ten, in fact, a whole decade, Luke Paxton thought.” Read from Matt Gallagher’s new novel, Daybreak. | Lit Hub Fiction Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz in conversation about anarchism and Ursula K. Le Guin. | Public Books An unpublished poem by Delmore Schwartz. | The Paris Review “In other words, when we look at history’s major censorious regimes, all of them—I want to stress that; all of them—invested enormous resources in programs designed to encourage self-censorship, more resources than they invested in using state action to actively destroy or censor information.” In light of the Hugo Awards controversy, Ada Palmer considers censorship. | Reactor An interview with Elizabeth Fiend, also known as Luna Ticks: “To me, comics were the only anti-bourgeois art form that replicated the DIY philosophy of punk. They were not typically showcased in galleries at that time. So the comics medium was the only one for me.” | The Comics Journal  Nina Strochlic looks inside an early 20th century “scam manual,” written to help German immigrants avoid being conned. | Atlas Obscura “Here was a woman who’d found the elusive balance, or dismissed the idea entirely.” Hillary Kelly on Diana Athill. | The New Yorker