The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1938, Orson Welles performs his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds on the radio. Panic ensues.
- Rebecca Solnit considers the reissue of Mike Davis’s Dead Cities and why “Mike knew apocalypses had been coming at us all along.” | Lit Hub Climate Change
- “Is the language of his killers not part of our life? Is there a death we have not cheapened?” Fady Joudah on images from Gaza. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Before the cottage, before the daisies in the grass, before / the narrow roads, before the fields cut into compartments / by the rocks and lichen, like a scalp divided phrenologically.” Read “Inis Meáin,” a poem by Gustav Parker Hibbett from the collection High Jump as Icarus Story. | Lit Hub Poetry
- Geoffrey Wawro explains why the United States was doomed to fail in Vietnam: “What motivated the United States to go to war and stay there was a fear of appearing weak.” | Lit Hub History
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“I’m pretty omnivorous when it comes to my reading habits.” Mike Fu’s TBR, featuring Ray Bradbury, Elysha Chang, Tony Tulathimutte, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
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- “Mave told me once I needed to write a book, and I said, ‘Beginning where?’” Read from Jessie van Eerden’s novel, Call it Horses. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “The real battle is not between urban dwellers and smallholding farmers—as capitalist social conflict or cheap populism would render it…” On communes and the state of the Hudson Valley. | Public Books
- Take a (snowy) look inside Orhan Pamuk’s notebooks. | The Paris Review
- Lisa Ko: “To pressure authors to remain silent about institutional response to war in order to be eligible for prestigious literary prizes is not only ironic — PEN America’s mission, for instance, is to protect freedom of expression — but sinister.” | Truthout
- Jamie Hood and Charlotte Shane discuss love, sex work, and writing: “The writing that I feel is most important can’t be monetized in any practical way, and, honestly, shouldn’t be.” | Bookforum
- Could the key to our technological woes be…steampunk? Joshua Rothman considers. | The New Yorker
- “Can Amazon reviews be more than just margin notes to Amazon’s particularly pernicious brand of monopoly capitalism?” Thomas Hobohm considers the universes within Kevin Killian’s Amazon reviews. | Dirt
