Lit Hub Daily: March 13, 2025

TODAY: In 1975, Ivo Andrić, Yugoslav novelist, poet, short story writer and winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature, dies.   Steven W. Thrasher asks, where is the moral courage in the American media? | Lit Hub Politics “For Hawthorne, human transcendence is not going to be found in any trans-human state.” What Nathaniel Hawthorne can teach us about the plague of techno-optimism. | Lit Hub Criticism Maris Kreizman on why politicians need to stop writing and start doing something instead. | Lit Hub Politics Laila Lalami on why people fear real-life dystopia but love dystopian fiction. | Lit Hub Craft “Even if characters are not physically alone, they are existentially isolated.” Ruth Franklin on the moody uncanniness of Shirley Jackson’s stories. | Lit Hub Criticism Amelia Rosselli, Samuel Beckett, Prem Krishnamurthy, and more are on Mónica de la Torre’s TBR. | Lit Hub Reading Lists “As he read he seemed half amused, half embarrassed. / I cringed with a weird delight.” Read “Robert Creeley,” a poem by Ron Padgett from the collection Pink Dust. | Lit Hub Poetry “I think I’m going to try trying. To do what’s necessary to be forever forgiven.” Read “I Think I’m Going to Try Trying,” a story by Nathan Dragon published in NOON Annual. | Lit Hub Fiction “I hope that Bezos will hold to his commitment, and to his stalwart practice, during Trump’s first term, of not knuckling under to the President’s pressure campaign to interfere with news coverage.” Ruth Marcus discusses her decision to leave The Washington Post. | The New Yorker Julia Kornberg considers the life, work, and mythology of César Vallejo. | Poetry “Her approach to naming disability does not draw a dividing line between her disability and her personhood but instead interweaves the two.” Paige Aniyah Morris on people and disability in Kim Heejin’s No Matter How Odd. | Words Without Borders Wendy Chen on translating the complete poems of Li Qingzhao: “In my family, recitations of classical Chinese poems were a part of the everyday fabric of conversation.” | Asymptote  Adam Eli and Torrey Peters talk about writing, fascism, and the Great American Novel. | Interview Why the pro-Palestine student movement won’t fizzle out. | The Nation