Lit Hub Daily: March 24, 2025

TODAY: In 1978, Leigh Brackett, one of the most prominent women writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, dies.   “The MFA nearly stomped out my desire to write.” Farid Matuk in conversation with Poets.org. | Lit Hub In Conversation Mia Fowler on traveling to Ghana, making sense of herself, and reading Maryse Condé’s Segu. | Lit Hub Criticism Emily Usher on the unrealistic idealism first-love stories and why more literature should depict crushes in their messy, authentic glory. | Lit Hub Craft What the paradoxical mating habits of the Black Grouse can reveal about the long history of evolution. | Lit Hub Science Edna Bonhomme documents the battles waged across Europe and the United States during the time of Spanish Influenza. | Lit Hub History On the joys of sharing the kitchen with children (also, a recipe!). | Lit Hub Food “The woman invited the man over for dinner and a movie and while they did eat dinner, she’d made a roast chicken with potatoes and string beans, they skipped the movie and instead started talking about their lives…” Read from Robert Lopez’s novel-in-stories, The Best People. | Lit Hub Fiction The inner workings of DOGE’s attacks on public libraries. | The New Republic “If the slender board had been 2,000 years old, the find might have been a Rosetta Stone, celebrated as the key to unlocking the stories of long-disappeared cultures.” On the beauty of documenting school library graffiti. | JSTOR Daily Toye Oladinni considers Ọlábísí Àjàlá’s travel memoir, An African Abroad. | The Paris Review Inside Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar’s best friends book tour. | Vanity Fair “I detect embers, even flames, of actual hope emanating from Gago’s writings, despite their theoretical density and the moral weight of her topics.” Amy Reed-Sandoval considers Verónica Gago’s feminist anti-fascism. | Los Angeles Review of Books Why is everyone reading Lonesome Dove all of a sudden? Michael Sebastian investigates. | Esquire