Literary Hub - Lit Hub Daily: January 26, 2021

• You deserve a work break: here’s (one of) Joan Didion’s seminal essay(s), “Why I Write.” | Lit Hub
• Indie bookstores are having a hell of time trying to survive the pandemic—yet they remain the “connective tissue between knowledge and action” on the way to revolution. | Lit Hub
• Astrophysicist Avi Loeb investigates that giant interstellar object that passed through our solar system (please tell us you haven’t forgotten about ‘Oumuamua!). | Lit Hub Science
• “What, once we’ve finally been forced to see what’s under our noses, will any of us actually do?” Carys Davies on writing about political crisis. | Lit Hub Politics
• Eliza Jane Brazier looks at 10 novels that explore true crime fandom. | CrimeReads
• A month of literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of January. | Book Marks
• From Nabokov on Nausea to Langston Hughes on James Baldwin, The New York Times Book Review looks back at 25 of its best reviews (and most important reviewers) from the last 125 years. | The New York Times
• “Leonora Carrington recognizes this subversive, eccentric position of womanhood.” Olga Tokarczuk on The Hearing Trumpet and the feminism of eccentricity. | The Paris Review
• The author of I Hate Men discusses misandry—“an intolerable brutality that adds up to the shocking outrage of precisely zero deaths and zero casualties.” | The Daily Beast
• Rafia Zakaria on Saadat Hasan Manto and the colonialist legacy of literary bans. | Lapham’s Quarterly
• “Reading wasn’t just about imagining myself a man; it was about imagining, period.” P. Carl on the 22 books that helped him write about transitioning. | Lit Hub
• On Raven Leilani’s Luster and narrators that “reverse the gazes of centuries” in their portrayals of whiteness. | Ploughshares
• “Didion worked hard at her sentences, and no magazine journalist has done better than her best. But style is just the baseline of good writing. Didion’s innovation was something else.” Nathan Heller’s grand unified theory of Joan Didion. | The New Yorker
• This year, a number of books entering the public domain were written by authors of the Harlem Renaissance. | JSTOR Daily

Michael Lind discusses class warfare and the perfect storm of crises
that got us here, on Keen On.

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Mateo Askaripour talks Sorry to Bother You and giving up the scarcity mindset,
on So Many Damn Books.

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On Lit Century, Sandra Newman and Catherine Newman discuss the ableist attitudes that framed V.C. Andrews as a character in one of her gothic novels.

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Jason Diamond reads an excerpt from his book The Sprawl, on Storybound.