June 23, 2025

Today, we’re thinking about “female realism,” the melancholy at the heart of Sex and the City, why writers turn to fascism, and more!

On Lit Hub dot com:

On the “female realism” of M.F.K. Fisher’s interwar food memoir, The Gastronomical Me. | Lit Hub Criticism
“Transgression doesn’t always equal transcendence and liberty isn’t always found in the libertine.” Ed Simon on why fascism seduces writers. | Lit Hub Politics
Alice Bolin on the late 20th century despair of Sex and the City: “In the struggle between modernity and tradition, women’s roles and bodies are the concession we make to the past.” | Lit Hub TV
Why Brendan O’Meara’s favorite kind of biography is unauthorized. | Lit Hub Craft
Benjamin Hale remembers his mentor William Melvin Kelley, a Black avant-garde novelist who experimented with language and narrative. | Lit Hub Biography
Diana Arterian talks to Poets.org about Agrippina the Younger, writing historical women, and poetry as liberty. | Lit Hub In Conversation
“Across the hall lived a woman named Helen. Lucy watched her from the hole in the door. She watched strange and beautiful young women coming and going from Helen’s apart-ment.” Read from Nini Berndt’s novel, There Are Reasons for This. | Lit Hub Fiction

“How many worlds can a garment inhabit at one time?” Cori Winrock on Emily Dickinson’s dresses on the moon. | The Paris Review
Tribeca’s Mysterious Bookshop was named the best indie bookstore in the country. | Time Out New York
Anderson Tepper revisits Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a novel that “played no small part in broadening the possibilities of African literature.” | The New York Times
“I was targeted for writing honestly about what was in front of me—the same thing I’m doing now.” Alistair Kitchen writes about how reporting on the Columbia protests led to his deportation. | The New Yorker
Fleur Hopkins-Loféroni explores a forgotten French sci-fi genre of brain swaps, death rays, and dinosaurs. | Aeon
Erin Evans considers oral history as anti-capitalist storytelling. | Full Stop