Lit Hub Daily September 15, 2021
TODAY: In 1890, Agatha Christie is born.
“The literature of the voice is dying. The literature of the pose has arrived. The basis of literary style has shifted.” Stephen Marche on Sally Rooney and contemporary fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism
T.C. Boyle recommends working through writer’s block with a few (metaphorical) bags of prunes. | Lit Hub Questionnaire
Vince Passaro recommends books that grapple with New York City as “literary character, literary machine, psychological event.” | Lit Hub Reading Lists
Eliot had come to believe that the depiction of “things that never existed—the ‘writing of novels’—might itself be a way of making the world better.” Rebecca Mead on Middlemarch. | Lit Hub Criticism
Idle chatter: Maria Tatar on why we should all be gossips. | Lit Hub
Andrea Abi-Karam considers the importance of radical ekphrasis, a way of speaking to the dead through artmaking. | Lit Hub
Vesper Flights, Money, The Wind in the Willows, and more rapid-fire book recs from Leif Enger. | Book Marks
Katie Lattari with five books in which paintings reveal surprising emotional truths. | CrimeReads
On Keen On, Giulio Boccaletti on how water shapes society, and Minal Bopaiah on equity as the foundation for group success. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel A reading list in honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month. | CLMP
Peril, the forthcoming book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, reveals just how close Mike Pence was to upending American democracy for his friend Donald Trump. | Washington Post
Hannah Giorgis on the untold stories of iconic Black TV shows. | The Atlantic
“I have a sense of normal being, you know, vast—vast and all inclusive.” Helen Shaw profiles Ruth Ozeki. | Vulture
Maddie Crum considers Simone de Beauvoir’s Inseparable, and the perils of posthumous publication. | The Baffler
Ryan M. Moser, a poet incarcerated in Florida, addresses depression in correctional facilities, “a real but unspoken problem.” | Mental Hellth
Chelsea T. Hicks pays tribute to N. Scott Momaday, who “offers readers a beguiling mixture of sacredness and irreverence.” | The Paris Review
“Yearning for connection is an undercurrent throughout Groff’s work.” Reading Lauren Groff’s new novel, Matrix. | Chicago Review of Books
NEW ON LIT HUB RADIO
Maggie Nelson on climate change and hopelessness, on Thresholds. * When prison “reforms” still do harm, this week on Reading Women. * Sarah Gilmartin reads from her new book, Dinner Party: A Tragedy, on Damian Barr’s Literary Salon.
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