Lit Hub Daily: How Will Mystery Writers Respond to the Upheavals of 2020?

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Lit Hub Daily

A taxonomy of famous writers’ houses, from Lord Byron’s abbey to Hanya Yanagihara’s Soho loft. | Lit Hub

How will humans measure time if biotechnology helps us live forever? Jeanette Winterson looks at the bigger picture of AI. | Lit Hub Tech

“In this one, she never knows hunger or pure, crystalline fear. In this one, she does.” In which Lucas Mann considers our tiny, spectacular futures (written a week after a very damning IPCC climate report). | Lit Hub Climate Change

Steph Cha wonders how mystery writers might respond to the tragedy, injustice, and crime on display in 2020. | Lit Hub

“I know now that these things cast a very long shadow over my life.” Carole Angier considers how history shaped W.G. Sebald’s work. | Lit Hub Biography

Katie Ives on the women who launched Summit, the first monthly climbing magazine in the US, when mountaineering was a “man’s world.” | Lit Hub Sports

Todd Doughty recommends books that spark joy. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

In praise of couscous: Christine Sahadi Whelan shares the recipe for a weeknight favorite. | Lit Hub Food

“My father even slept to Fox News, his nighttime ears serenaded by fearmongering about Archie Bunker’s lost American dream.” Phillip Hurst searches for inner peace in the wake of his father’s ideology. | Lit Hub Memoir

Christian Lorentzen on Richard Powers’s Bewilderment, Tony Tulathimutte on Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

James McGrath Morris on Tony Hillerman and the origins of his iconic second fiddle, Jim Chee. | CrimeReads

WATCH: Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi and Eileen Myles on writing against linearity • Robbie Bach on venture terrorism • Max Chafkin on the dangerous intersection of tech and politics • Fiona Hill on the increasingly Russian way of life in America. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

Read a new short story by Chen Qiufan, translated by Emily Jin. | Noema

Victoria Chang discusses her book, the strange nature of memory, and silence as inheritance. | NPR

“Everyone is somebody’s agent, his novels seem to be saying; everyone is the instrument of a power they have no ability to counter or even recognize.” Jake

Bittle on John Le Carré’s genius for surveillance. | The New Republic

Jay Caspian Kang explores how the term “Asian American” became “mostly meaningless.” | The Nation

Juan Gabriel Vásquez considers the power of fiction “to liberate us from our frustratingly limited perspectives on life.” | Words Without Borders

Rebecca Solnit talks about reading George Orwell in an era of climate crisis. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Gary Budden breaks down the books that engage with urban legends. | The Guardian

Susan Orlean discusses the animal kingdom and the goal

of writing, on The Maris Review. 

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José Vadi breaks down race and class politics in the 1993 action film The Fugitive, on Open Form. 

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Chris Hedges talks to Lena Herzog about the pandemic’s ultimatum, on The Quarantine Tapes. 

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Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda on the alchemy of making

music and art, on Change Lab. 

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Georgina Pazcoguin talks patriarchy in the ballet, on Book Dreams. 

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We Have Ways of Making You Talk digs into the controversies surrounding WWII military leader George S. Patton. 

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