Lit Hub Daily: December 13, 2024

The Beatles breaking up: on the protracted end of a band that transformed rock and roll forever. | Lit Hub Music “Something will enrage you and something will haunt you. And something will strike you as beautiful and true.” Derek Mong on finding literary inspiration in visual art. | Lit Hub Art “Some of us became teachers of literature because we believe it helps keep us human, even in a world of genocide.” A statement to the Modern Language Association about the BDS movement. | Lit Hub Politics The enduring political relevance of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” | Lit Hub Politics “The bullet goes right by you / a dove shakes the stars from its wings / casting peace upon your darkened way.” Read “The bullet,” a poem by Sahar Rabah, translated from Arabic by Ammiel Alclay. | Lit Hub Poetry Read an excerpt from Lisa Sandlin’s novel Sweet Vidalia. | Lit Hub Fiction “Contemporary Turkish literature would look different if authors wrote soulful books like Atay’s that truly told us how it feels to live in Turkey.” Kaya Genç on Oğuz Atay. | The Point There’s no shortcut to publishing a book. | Defector Negar Azimi considers the unjustly forgotten work of Caroline Blackwood, muse to Lucien Freud and Robert Lowell, and “the author of wit-drenched books about the wages of class, women’s inhumanity to women, bitchiness, greed, abjection, family, monsters.” | The New Yorker Molly Templeton makes the case for seeking out small press science fiction and fantasy. | Reactor Even in blue states, book bans are having chilling effect on the sales of children’s books. | Los Angeles Times