TODAY: In 1937, Jim Harrison is born.
- “He believed he’d learn much more by traveling with Nunamiut hunters first, questioning them about wolf behavior in general.” Barry Lopez on the wildlife biologist who changed his life as an environmentalist. | Lit Hub Nature
- “Black Futures started as all great contemporary love stories do—on an app!” Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham talk social media, Black futurity, and the archive. | Lit Hub
- “It is here that the stories of violence and love most painfully intersect—so painfully that one might wonder if the word love is appropriate at all.” Mary Gaitskill on Agaat, a novel of Apartheid-era South Africa. | Lit Hub
- DIARY OF A COVID YEAR: “With each passing moment, with no word on the status of my father, I felt myself creep closer to the edge.” | Lit Hub Health
- “Uwe Johnson is counted among the ‘casualties’ of his generation—a defiantly independent writer who appears to have laid waste to his own life.” On the German writer who found a home on a remote English island. | Lit Hub
- “The Epidemic case histories record carefully observed effects, always in other people.” Robin Lane Fox reads some of the earliest medical texts in existence. | Lit Hub History
- “George Houser would come to work with most of the leading figures of the 20th century’s major civil rights.” Sheila D. Collins on the long life of an actual social justice warrior. | Lit Hub
- The best crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers of 2020, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. | CrimeReads
- New titles from Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Jorie Graham, Margaret Atwood, and Robert Hass all feature among the Best Reviewed Poetry Collections of 2020. | Lit Hub, Book Marks
- “Self-branding of this kind is less tragic narcissism and more a manifestation of uncertain labor markets . . . ‘a way to retain and assert personal agency and control within a general context of uncertainty and flux.’” On Caroline Calloway, the gig economy, self-publishing, and the publishing of one’s self. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- From Ray Bradbury to Victor LaValle, Alice Hoffman has some book recommendations for you. | ELLE
- “Indeed for many weeks & months together … I did not leave my bedroom.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s letter detailing the loneliness of isolation is headed to auction. | The Guardian
- “My spirit bends worlds and does things that shouldn’t be possible, not with the way my flesh or this world is set up, but I’m learning that my body is something to be reckoned with as well.” Akwaeke Emezi grapples with the intersection of spirit and body. | The Paris Review
- These story collections, published by small presses in 2020, deserve a second look. | Chicago Review of Books
- A new book argues for self-help as “worthy of study in itself and also for what it reveals over time about readers’ habits, desires and values.” | The Times Literary Supplement