#Lithub

[all-the-things-2020]

This was featured on LitHub today:

Never feel ashamed of writing (or reading) fan fic.

[charliejaneanders]

So grateful to Lithub for including Lessons in Magic and Disaster in its list of the most anticipated books of 2025! "Should be a total delight for the late summer, one-more-book-before-back-to-school days."

[doubledaybooks]

Read an excerpt of VANISHING TREASURES in LitHub

In 1606 a devastating pestilence swept through London; the dying were boarded up in their homes with their families, and a decree went out that the theaters, the bear-baiting, and the brothels be closed. It was then that Shakespeare wrote one of his very few references to the plague, catching at our precarity:

The dead man’s knell Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives Expire before the flowers in their caps Dying or ere they sicken.

As he wrote the words, a Greenland shark who is still alive today swam untroubled through the waters of the northern seas. It was, at the time, perhaps a hundred years old, still some way off its sexual maturity: its parents would have been old enough to have lived alongside Boccaccio: its great-great­ grandparents alongside Julius Caesar. For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as aboveground the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.

I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very idea of them hopeful.

READ MORE

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In 1972, in the Democratic primary, we had our first Black woman presidential candidate, “unbought and unbossed” Shirley Chisolm, who knew that she was only running a symbolic campaign, a protest campaign, that America was not going to elect a non-white person or a non-male person, let alone someone with the temerity to be both at the same time—of course she didn’t get the nomination. When she ran, Barack Obama was going on eleven. Kamala Harris turned eight later that year. I doubt anyone was telling them they could grow up to be president.

I was so moved by how Kamala Devi Harris was received when she became our presidential candidate in July of 2024, 52 years after Shirley Chisolm, how much more enthusiasm and respect and how much less racism and sexism than I anticipated from Democrats and progressives. It made me feel like I lived in a better country, a country that had somehow invisibly, incrementally, moved forward, in those ways too slow and subtle to measure until a milestone like this is reached. Somehow something as subtle as values, consciousness, norms had changed through the work so many people were doing in so many ways, the feminists and antiracists, the slow process of decentralizing power just a bit from the long grim era when only white men ran and won and governed.

Things are changing. Last week, President Biden went to the Gila Reservation in Arizona to apologize for the Indian boarding schools and other genocidal acts toward Native Americans. He said in a tweet:

Today, I’m in Arizona to issue a long overdue presidential apology for this era—and speak to how my Administration has worked to invest in Indian Country and our relationships with Tribal Nations, advance Tribal sovereignty and self-determination, respect Native cultures, and protect Indigenous sacred sites. We must remember our full history, even when it’s painful. That’s what great nations do. And we are a great nation.

A few decades ago, Native people were largely ignored by the non-native mainstream, and what the US government had done was justified when it was not just ignored. We live in the impossible world, the world that no one quite imagined, in which things happen—marriage equality, the possibilities brought by solar energy, a Black woman presidential candidate—that were inconceivable not long ago.

I think of all the land-back happening around the West, of the four dams coming down on the Klamath River under the stewardship of the several Native nations there, of the salmon already swimming more than a hundred miles up that river to Oregon after more than a century of being shut out, of this presidential apology that acknowledges 532 years of colonialism. Biden’s tweet strategically rebukes Trump and MAGA and all the fragile white nationalists by insisting that this country is already great, and that greatness means remembering and taking responsibility for the wrongs of the past, including this genocidal racism.

That this country is polarized is often deplored, but the backlash against the progress on human rights, equality, inclusion, environmental protection, and acknowledging the US’s often-brutal history, is no reason to give up or cave in on that progress, though it’s a reason to reach out to try to convey that we all benefit from it.

What’s also been moving to me since this election really picked up momentum a few months ago is to see how much people care about something beyond narrow and immediate self-interest, to see that we care about public life, about the fate of the nation, about the rule of law, about the survival of the most vulnerable. To see that we are idealists, we are dreamers, we are citizens in that sense not of nationality but of membership in the greater community. Something striking this time around is to see men speak up for reproductive rights to a degree and in a way they mostly have not before.

We love so much more than the narrow version of who we are acknowledges: we love justice, love truth, love freedom, love equality, love the confidence that comes with secure human rights.

So many powerful forces conspire to try to convince us that we are basically selfish animals, that all we want is the the goods of private life, some safety, some sex and personal love and family, some nifty possessions. That’s the story of human nature we get told the most. But in fact most human beings are altruists and idealists, which is to say we want a lot more, we care about a lot more, we need a lot more to feel right with the world. We want justice and peace, want to live in a society that supports these things, want a relationship with nature, and we want that nature to be protected and thriving.

We want a world that reflects our values, we feel injured by things that may not affect us directly, whether it’s a wildfire or a loss of rights. Of course they’re not all the same values, and yeah some people believe they need to persecute immigrants or trans youth to have their happy world, some people still think nature is so vast and immutable we can keep trashing it without consequences. But mainly what I’m trying to say is that most people care about a lot beyond the usual definition of self-interest. We’re bigger than that.

You can see that by how much people care about the outcome of this election, whether they’re sitting home refreshing polls as if the polls tell us what will happen or doing the work that decides what will happen. Someone said to me a week or so ago that people over 70 shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they had no self-interest in the future. I rebuked him, because across the political spectrum most of us vote our broad values, not our narrow self-interest, unless our values are that we’re just our self-interest (and that’s a core belief of the right).

Most of us are idealists. There’s been a lot of exclamation in recent years about right-wing working-class voters who vote against their self-interest, often portrayed as baffling, as a sign of ignorance or confusion. What’s really going on that they’re more committed to their values than their practical self-interest. So are we (though you could also argue that the recognition that we are inextricably connected to each other and to nature means that self-interest and the well-being of the whole are not separate).

I used the word care, but let me clarify: what we care about is what we love. And we love so much more than the narrow version of who we are acknowledges: we love justice, love truth, love freedom, love equality, love the confidence that comes with secure human rights; we love places, love rivers and valleys and forests, love seasons and the pattern and order they imply, love wildlife from hummingbirds to great blue herons, butterflies to bears. This always was a love story.

Part of what gives our lives meaning is the confidence or at least hope that these good things will persevere beyond us.

What I learned from studying how most human beings respond to disasters (for my book A Paradise Built in Hell) is that they’re brave, generous, creative, acting in solidarity with those around them, and that those experiences of immediacy, of community, of care, of connection and meaningful work, are often so profound that people speak up with joy even amidst the devastation and loss. Because we want meaning and meaningful work so much, we want connection so much, we want hope, we want to believe in ourselves and the people around us and humanity in general.

I’m hearing so many stories like that from the survivors of the climate-intensified hurricanes that trashed western North Carolina, coastal Florida, and other parts of the Southeastern USA. From the victims of a climate-intensified catastrophe that has wrecked whole towns and torn out roads, flattened forests, washed away homes and put parts of Asheville underwater. I don’t want any more disasters like that, and I’m a climate activist to try to keep nature from getting more violent and destructive, which it will if we keep being violent and destructive toward the climate. But I do want us to know who we are, and how hungry we are for meaning, purpose, and connection, and sometimes disaster lets us see that.

When it comes to the climate we want faith in the future, we want the symphony of life to continue with the harmonies, the beauties, the integration of the parts into one harmonious whole to continue. Part of what gives our lives meaning is the confidence or at least hope that these good things will persevere beyond us, that there will be bison grazing the prairies in the year 2124, that there will be whales migrating in the oceans, that wildflowers will bloom in spring and pollinators will come for the nectar and leave with the pollen, that the people we love who are one or six or seventeen or their grandchildren will have a chance to enjoy some of the things we have, that there will be joy and beauty and possibility in the year 2074 and after.

Polls offer the false promise of knowing what is going to happen, but what is going to happen in this election is what campaigners, activists, and the electorate make happen. It is not yet decided. We are deciding it with what we do, as voters, as organizers, as voices for truth, justice, inclusion, the reality of the climate crisis and the importance of acting on it. In June, I got to meet one of my heroes, Congressman Jamie Raskin when he gave a keynote for the Third Act chapters in DC, Virginia and Maryland. (Third Act is a climate group founded by Bill McKibben for US people over 60; I’m on its board.) He gave me his memoir of prosecuting the impeachment of Trump after January 6, right after his beloved son Tommy had died by suicide, and there’s a dazzling passage in it that reminds us of the power of participation.

He writes that, during his first campaign, there was an article in a local newspaper quoting a pundit who described my chances of victory as “impossible”; and nine months later, when we got 67 percent of the vote, there was another article, in the Washington Post, quoting a pundit who said my victory was “inevitable.” So we went from impossible to inevitable in nine months because the pundits are never wrong, but as I told Tommy, we showed that nothing in politics is impossible, and nothing in politics is inevitable. It is all just possible, through the democratic arts of education, organizing, and mobilizing for change.

We’re here to make the victory of democracy and the defeat of authoritarianism not just possible but actual. We’re here to make history. We’re here to get out the vote. For the climate, for the children, for the continuance of this experiment in democracy, imperfect as it has been.

_____________________________

This is a version of a talk given to Third Act Nevada as part of a rally for people getting out the vote in that swing state. 

Rebecca Solnit

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty-five books on feminism, environmental and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. She co-edited the 2023 anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Her other books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and in 2022 launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).

[ostensiblynone]

Noel: We would get subtitled on MTV, which I found fucking hilarious. People would say, “Does that offend you in any way?” I would be, “No, I think it’s fucking brilliant.” Life should be subtitled.

—Shitholes, USA: Noel and Liam Gallagher On When Oasis Toured America | Excerpted from Supersonic: The Complete, Authorized, and Uncut Interviews by Oasis. Curated by Simon Halfon. Copyright © 2021

[shakespearenews]

Thankfully, Grant’s friend, the actress Marta Hallard, lands upon a brilliant suggestion: if everything in the present is boring, why not venture deep into the past? A vexing historical mystery ought to do, and Grant lands on the story of the two Princes in the Tower, allegedly confined to the Tower of London in 1483 after the death of their father, King Edward IV and subsequently murdered by their uncle, Richard III, who soon ascended the throne—and made infamous for his supposed villainy in Shakespeare’s play more than a century later.

www.shakespearenews.com

[starryeyedloather]

sveiki!

gal kas turi patarimu, kur galima butu savo eilerascius ar dar kazka ikelti? tumblr veikia, bet, kaip supratau, cia zmoniu ne tiek ir daug :Dd (myliu visus, kurie skaito, nepamirskit)

noreciau pasiekt daugiau zmoniu, gaut daugiau kritikos, nuomoniu, atsiliepimu ar dar kazko.

jei zinot kokia vieta lmk :)

[purrlockswatson]

Stop feeding the goat, damn it! Anthony Inglethorpe, je te déteste.

Heaven knows the publishing industry has always been a savage garden to begin with. Now they're welcoming this demon goat to eat his fill. Shame on you, HarperCollins, and anyone who follows in their example.

I'm doing a Phantom of the Opera. I'm going to hold my manuscripts and climb into a coffin and never leave.

(Demon Goat design inspired by that tiny goat who started a cult in Helluva Boss. See here for why I draw AI as a goat.)

[beingharsh]

Apparently, almost no one here at the hospital likes me. Until I met Inga, I’d never realized that. I’m an honest, sunny sort of person, so if people have a bad impression of me, it must be because some outside force assigned me the role of villain before I even got here. By “outside” I mean beyond the scope of my awareness. This is a serious problem. I’m like a beloved actor playing the role of a cold, vicious murderer—he has to stay in character: he can’t simply grin at the audience in the middle of the play and say, “This isn’t the real me, you know.” Or perhaps not a play, but a movie. An actor can go to his dressing room after a play, where he’ll take his makeup off, and then, back to his normal self, his fans will crowd around with bouquets. But with a movie, no one can see his off-screen self. Nothing’s more miserable than being trapped inside someone else’s movie.

Suggested in the Stars, Yoko Tawada

[purplespacekitty]

"If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze-

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself-

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale"

-Dr. Refaat Alareer

The Refaat Mobile Library, dedicated in memorial to the late Palestinian poet and educator Dr. Refaat Alareer, is organizing an emergency fundraiser for Gaza. Please donate what you can and share.

[forestandfaerie]

MUST READS! In response to the 2nd Tangerine Regime.

Courtesy of LitHub- which by the way, if you're not subscribed to their e-mail list or regularly visit their website, you're missing out. They do incredible things for independent literature! RESPONDING TO THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: • Kim Kelly on the how-tos and DOs and DON’Ts of mutual aid • Madeline ffitch on direct action and survival work in the face of fascism • Josh Cook on what the publishing industry can do in the face of authoritarianism. | Lit Hub Politics

[luckybugsdiary]

"If books are banned, and people try to put them into the hands of young people, they lose their jobs. Librarians are scared, teachers are scared. And for me, it’s heartbreaking."

[easternpine]

"Book bans do not protect children. They just rob Americans of the freedom to read."

If you are traditionally published or self-published author, please consider signing up for Authors Against Book Bans! We need everyone invested in this uphill battle.

[author-mandi-bean]

On writing and money (part one).

What can American classics communicate about the pitfalls of a capitalist society? Is the American Dream dead?

“It was so hard to be poor, not to have money and position, and to be able to do in life exactly as you wished.” – Theodore Dresier, An American Tragedy In my high school English classroom, the last novel we studied was the American classic (and my favorite novel of all time) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a timeless, powerful study of contemporary America and the ultimate denial…