July 20 in Books: A Day Worth Reading Slowly
On this date in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the steamer Governor Higginson crosses paths with something in the water that cannot be explained – a moment that anchors one of the most quietly unsettling openings in adventure fiction. July 20 also marks the day O. Henry walked out of prison, released after serving time for a crime he may not have committed. Two literary anniversaries separated by fiction and fact, and not entirely easy to tell apart.
The rest of today’s reading spans Greek citizenship paperwork and grief, indigenous Hawaiian history, the slow death of standardized testing’s authority, and a poet so difficult to categorize that getting her biography into print took an act of near-institutional stubbornness. It is, in other words, a full day.
The Biography Problem, From Two Directions
Fiona Sampson, writing for Lit Hub’s Craft section, takes up a question that sounds deceptively simple: what separates a literary biography from any other kind? The answer, as Sampson frames it, has everything to do with how the writer positions themselves in relation to their subject – not as a chronicler of events, but as a reader making visible the connections between a life and the work it produced.
The difficulty of that task shows up concretely in a piece from The Walrus about the Canadian poet Margaret Avison, who died in 2007. The writer puts it plainly: “But even by poetic standards, Margaret Avison was an odd duck.” Getting her biography written, then accepted, then published required working against a publishing infrastructure that does not know what to do with poets who resist easy classification. Avison won the Governor General’s Award twice and spent decades working with the poor in Toronto – a life dense with meaning that still somehow did not make her an obvious commercial bet for a biographer.
Franklin Foer’s Soccer Book, Revisited With a Cooler Eye
Alex Shephard’s reassessment of Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World, published in 2004 and reviewed now in The New Republic, identifies the book’s central structural problem with surgical precision: “The most interesting thing about How Soccer Explains the World is the tension between being a travelogue and an airport book.” That friction – between genuine reportorial curiosity and the flattening demands of a mass-market argument – turns out to be worth examining again two decades on, particularly as that genre of “sport as lens for geopolitics” has since become its own small industry.
Meanwhile, Richard Fallon writes for Public Domain Review about Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland and the broader literary tradition of lost-world fiction – a genre that was once doing serious cultural work around empire, exploration, and what counted as civilization. Gratacap is not a household name, and Fallon’s piece is partly an argument for why the canon of lost-worlds writing deserves a more rigorous accounting than it currently gets.
Shephard’s piece and Fallon’s share an underlying question that neither states outright: when a book is filed under “popular nonfiction” or “genre fiction,” what exactly gets left unread? How Soccer Explains the World was a bestseller that serious readers sometimes treated as too breezy. The New Northland is an obscure novel that serious readers mostly never found. The distance between those two fates is partly about marketing and partly about who gets to draw the line between literature and entertainment in any given decade.
Seymour Chwast’s children’s illustration work gets a full survey from Bruce Handy in The New York Times – a reminder that Chwast, co-founder of Push Pin Studios and one of the defining graphic voices of postwar American design, has a body of work for young readers that sits somewhat separately from his reputation as a designer’s designer. Handy’s piece makes the case that the children’s books deserve attention on their own terms.
Fiction, Grief, and the Record-Skip of Aging
Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s story “Wild Light,” published in the new issue of Michigan Quarterly Review and excerpted at Lit Hub, opens with a narrator waking on a Tuesday surrounded by light that does not behave like light: “I wake up on a Tuesday cloaked in light. The light isn’t simply radiating off me. It is spitting and sparking. It feels like a second skin.” It is a strange, committed opening – the kind that announces immediately that the story will not be offering explanations as a courtesy.
The Lit Hub Memoir section carries a piece about returning to a family’s homeland while navigating grief, with the writer describing years of effort to obtain Greek citizenship – a process that, when one parent was born in Greece, is “ostensibly straightforward.” The word “ostensibly” is doing considerable work in that sentence. Separately, a Lit Hub Health piece examines what changing attitudes toward aging reveal about psychology and self-perception, with one writer describing the sensation of having skipped, without warning, from her late twenties to her mid-thirties: “I felt as if my life had done a kind of record-skip.”
History That Is Not Distant
Two historical pieces in today’s roundup concern the weaponization of medicine and food against indigenous communities. The Lit Hub History section covers how leprosy was deliberately used as a tool of control and displacement against indigenous Hawaiians – a story that sits at the intersection of colonial policy, public health theater, and land seizure. Chef Nephi Craig writes in the Lit Hub Food section about the necessity of preserving Native cuisines, framing the work not as cultural archiving but as something more immediate and political.
Slate runs a piece asking what standardized testing is actually worth now that AI can perform well on the same assessments designed to measure human competence. The question is not new, but the urgency has shifted. Steven W. Thrasher, writing in Lit Hub Politics, argues that “making a commitment to curb Israel’s ability to wage war is the new floor necessary to win elections in the United States” – a claim about the changed political calculus that will read differently depending on where you stand.
What keeps today’s reading from collapsing into noise is the number of pieces that circle a single problem from different angles: the gap between what something actually is and how institutions decide to categorize, use, or discard it. Margaret Avison, too odd to publish easily. The New Northland, too obscure to stay canonical. Native cuisine, too peripheral to protect until it almost disappeared. Leprosy, redefined by colonial administrators into something that justified removal. The Michigan Quarterly Review story opens with light that “feels like a second skin” – which is either a metaphor about identity or a warning that the narrator’s relationship to her own body has become estranged. Gerkensmeyer does not say which, and the story is better for it.
