Lit Hub Daily: December 1, 2022

• “There is no normal, there is no feminine.” Wisdom from the world’s foremost purveyors of hip and butt pads. | Lit Hub

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• A widowing and a wedding: On the early days of Sarah Kidd’s marriage to a notorious pirate. | Lit Hub Biography

• Ted Conover’s dispatches from off-grid life in Colorado: “Prairie people overall just seemed poor and wanting a different life—one with more self-reliance, fewer bills from utility companies, and, in many cases, lots of distance from neighbors.” | Lit Hub Politics

• Ian Kershaw considers Hitler’s colossal “legacy of ruin and suffering,” and the reminders that still recur throughout Europe. | Lit Hub History

• In this week’s Life Advice for Book Lovers, Dorothea recommends reads for finding closure after a “situationship.” | Lit Hub

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• Philippa Snow on Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica, Dwight Garner on Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Eight new crime books to check out this December. | CrimeReads

• “How I relish the moments when I muster the wit and imagination to cross the threshold into his phenomenal reality, being instead of knowing.” John Summers on autism and life outside conventional narrative. | The Point

• We Need Diverse Books is launching Books Save Lives, an initiative against censorship that will provide schools and libraries additional funding to purchase banned books. | Publishers Weekly

• Lucie Ives considers the “enlivening, challenging” and indispensable “weak novel.” | The Baffler

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• How the victory of a nonbinary writer in a prestigious German literary prize sparked a debate about gender-inclusive language. | The New York Times

• “The ability to guess the Wordle based on context clues that would appeal to Andy Borowitz is soul-crushing.” Lizzie O’Leary makes a plea for a return to Wordle randomness. | Slate

• “Could this book really be as bad as I imagined?” Tim Jonze reflects on his own NaNoWriMo novel. | The Guardian

• Your guide to December’s free virtual literary events. | The Hub

Also on Lit Hub: Miyako Pleines on the elusiveness of language in Bones and All • Baek Sehee on falling through life’s cracks • Read from Jack Driscoll’s latest collection, Twenty Stories, New and Selected