Lit Hub Weekly: November 23 – 25, 2020

TODAY: In 1960, Richard Wright dies.

“If one of them was awarded the prize, the winner would read a statement that rebuked the male-dominated awards hierarchy.” On the time Adrienne Rich turned down a National Book Award. | Lit Hub Biography
“Finish reading an especially difficult book, and its cover functions more like a trophy awarded for intellectual labor.” Legendary designer Peter Mendelsund on what a book cover can do. | Lit Hub Design
“The curious story of how a sticky discharge from billions of insect bodies became a vehicle for the globalization of audio culture.” Would we even have rock n’ roll if we didn’t have shellac? | Lit Hub History
“Did you sometimes want to kill your husband after you had a baby?” Ellen O’Connell Whittet on the pandemic stress of writing while parenting. | Lit Hub Craft
The best reviewed books of the month in history and politics; science, tech, and nature; and memoir and biography. | Book Marks
Sarah Weinman on the brief and tragic life of Linda Millar, the troubled daughter of crime writers Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar. | CrimeReads
Penguin Random House is set to buy Simon & Schuster for $2 billion and we are not looking forward to social media trying to guess the new name. | CNBC
“The quality of her dreaming, its interior abstraction, is exquisite. Its wonder lies in how closed its shutters are to any mundane world, how far back the lanes and alleyways of its imagining recede from the proper nouns and pedestrianisms of our lives.” On Renee Gladman’s surreal architectures. | n+1
“Though most people associate Nina Simone with the jazz clubs of New York and Paris, she grew up here, in rural Appalachia.” Leah Hampton on what the American imagination gets wrong about its rural spaces. | Guernica
“Call me old‐fashioned, but I happen to believe that a BABY! should get to have an ASS! no matter WHAT!” Read an excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s forthcoming novel. | The New Yorker
Jan Morris, noted historian and travel writer, has died at the age of 94. | The Guardian
“Now we have room for routine and we make no objection to sitting outdoors in the cold, on stools.” Aysegul Savas on neighborly life during the pandemic. | The Paris Review
Morgan Thomas on the rise of queer ecological novels, which “ask how our perception of what is ‘natural’ impacts our relationships with the environment and each other.” | Ploughshares
“We are all from somewhere. It’s the artist’s job to question the values that went into the making of that somewhere.” Hilton Als on Joan Didion. | NYRB
“I have a natural investment in the landscape through my ancestry. It’s something that I think about quite often and have for a long time. So I finally put it down in this book.” Read an interview with N. Scott Momaday. | CS Monitor
Alison Stine: “From one of the very first shots, I knew the Appalachia of this film was not going to be the Appalachia that I, my family, or my friends know.” At least this Thanksgiving we can all share in dunking on Hillbilly Elegy. | Salon
How does GPT-3, “the latest incarnation of artificially intelligent natural-language systems,” write when it writes about love? | The New York Times
Here’s how educators can avoid the pitfall of books that portray Native American cultures inaccurately, disrespectfully, or as stereotypes. | JSTOR Daily
One reason to start journaling: the psychological benefits of writing by hand. | FastCompany

Also on Lit Hub:

Talking to Peter Blackstock, the editor behind back-to-back to Booker Prizes • A young V.S. Naipaul writers a letter home to dad • Artist Bruce McCall about his favorite New Yorker covers • The life and times of an Italian Nazi fighter • Mark Twain absolutely doing Thanksgiving the right way • The grift that keeps on giving: on the prosperity gospel • Ntozake Shange on Sun Ra and how she came to have her name • Nancy Star on the ways we can get lost, in writing and the woods • Luigi Amara considers the dearth of a unified theory of the hair piece • “When American troops returned stateside after WWI ended, they brought their taste for doughnuts with them” • Katherine Morgan on selling books to white “allies” • Momentary joy in a refugee camp manifests in a game of soccer • A conversation between Pamela Painter and Margot Livesey • Mark Podwal on a lifetime project of illustrating Elie Wiesel’s books • The best book covers of November • On the failures of Reconstruction (lest we repeat them)

Best of Book Marks:

Ed Caesar recommends five epic works of mountain literature, from Into Thin Air to Touching the Void • Chelsea G. Summers recommends five books that make you feel uncomfortable in your skin, from The Bloody Chamber to Geek Love • Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Martin Amis’ Money, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, and more rapid-fire book recs from Ryan Chapman