Literary Hub - Lit Hub Daily: March 23, 2021

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Lit Hub Daily

“People who buy books! What a special category of souls.” Nicola DeRobertis-Theye on coming of age in a struggling Berkeley Bookstore. | Lit Hub

“I had heard professors talk about the joys of a freer mode of storytelling, writing as exploration. But I always resisted it.” Andrew J. Graff on learning to go with the flow... in writing and whitewater rafting. | Lit Hub

17 new books out today (just in time to read outside in the sunshine). | Lit Hub

How Jacqueline Winspear became a mystery writer while breaking all the rules. | CrimeReads

“There is blood here and vigor, love and hate, irony and compassion.” A 1959 review of Philip Roth’s debut. | Book Marks

“These attacks invalidate American stories, individually and in the collective.” Charles Yu on anti-Asian violence and dehumanization. | Los Angeles Times

In the Japanese mountain town of Yamanaka, Hannah Kirshner observes the intricate craftmanship of turning Urushi trees into lacquer. | Lit Hub

“Maybe, against all odds and reason, my mother was there in spirit form, waiting to talk to me.” Laura Maylene Walter on the art of belief, from a spiritualist retreat to her debut novel. | Lit Hub

Nawal El Saadawi, Egyptian feminist writer, physician, and activist, has died
at 89. | BBC

“Poetry has been a good segue into thinking about voice and style in the way that I did with the novel.” Gabriela Garcia on Of Women and Salt and narrative themes. | Elle 

How Helen Frankenthaler’s art took her from high society to the downtown art scene of 1950s NYC, even when “becoming an artist was not necessarily in line with the family mythology.” | Lit Hub Biography

“Imagining is a Black tradition. It is a queer tradition.” Shayla Lawz on speculative fiction and the revolutionary act of imagining. | Catapult 

Reading this year’s NBCC Award finalists: Stephanie Burt on Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America. | Lit Hub

“Le Guin or Butler or Chandler are genre writers and transcendent writers. They are highly literary and proudly working in genre traditions.” Considering the dueling jargons of the sci-fi and literary genres. | Countercraft

Fear, loss, and the lessons of C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed in a year of pandemic. | Vox

“I gave myself the simple assignment to look in the mirror and try to describe myself accurately and, to the best of my ability, without judgment.” Susan Stinson on finding the language for fatness. | Poets & Writers

Shayla Lawson reads an excerpt from This Is Major, on Storybound. 

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Why people are still mad about Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to

Be a Bat?” This week on Lit Century. 

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Nicholas Freudenberg discusses how modern capitalism is

ruining our health, on Keen On.

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