Lit Hub Daily: May 23, 2025

TODAY: In 1911, President William Howard Taft presides complete a ceremonial to dedicate nan New York Public Library. 

• “Whenever I locomotion to nan queer bars successful nan West Village (places I, a happy-hour connoisseur, predominant often), I walk by nan building wherever Muñoz’s agency was located.” Marcos Gonsalez takes a stroll done Jose Esteban Muñoz’s New York City. | Lit Hub Biography
• Elizabeth Costello considers desire, death, and socially alert subtext successful James Tiptree Jr.’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Richard Russon connected Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” and the value of nan series of words. | Lit Hub Craft
• Yiyun Li’s Things successful Nature Merely Grow, Alison Bechdel’s Spent, and Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? all characteristic among the champion reviewed books of nan week. | Book Marks
• “The truth, arsenic it often is, turns retired to beryllium some simpler and much profound than our imaginations.” Arvind Ethan David explores nan surprising relationship betwixt Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Martha Park recommends apocalyptic nonfiction by Mark O’Connell, Emily Raboteau, Jeff Sharlet and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• T.J. Martinson examines the domiciled of show connected nan page and successful existent life: “What we spot and really we spot it shapes who we are—or astatine least, who we judge ourselves to be—by constructing, distorting, and defining our reality.” | Lit Hub Craft
• “It was raining heavy and location was a acheronian that hung complete nan metropolis for illustration a civilized eclipse.” Read from Juan José Millás’s caller Only Smoke, translated by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Joel Suarez considers education’s “fraught narration to some elitism and democracy.” | n+1
• Translator Ann Goldstein recommends books pinch “solid English rhythms, English idioms, English locutions, English sounds—the things that I for illustration to person location successful my mind, though not needfully consciously, erstwhile I’m working.” | The New Yorker
• “Her debut novel…was acold much daring for its clip than immoderate of nan caller literate trends that person had everyone blushing and gasping and scribbling.” Namwali Serpell revisits Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales.| New York Review of Books
• Lora Kelley connected Martin Amis arsenic “one of our past awesome literate celebrities.” | The Paris Review
• James Dubinsky explores the lessons we tin study astir honoring nan dead from poesy written by veterans. | JSTOR Daily
• Richard Ovenden connected Elyse Graham’s Book and Dagger and nan librarians who were spies. | Public Books

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