Lit Hub Daily: December 12, 2022

• “No matter how long ago slavery might seem, it is always disquietingly close to us, both in time and memory.” Gabrielle Bellot on the new Kindred adaptation and Octavia Butler’s fear of historical amnesia. | Lit Hub Film & TV

  Article continues after advertisement

• Ken Chen on the genius of Annie Ernaux, “a writer who operates on the knife edge between public and private life.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• The best reviewed memoirs and biographies of 2022 (according to Book Marks). | Lit Hub

• How much pain should we tolerate for publicity? Or, when your book tour is interrupted by a near-death experience. | Lit Hub Memoir

• In the latest installment of When I’m Not Writing, Pitchaya Sudbanthad reflects on the dual usefulness of restoring vintage fountain pens. | Lit Hub

  Article continues after advertisement

• Ten Thousand Public Enemies: On the crime book that J. Edgar Hoover co-produced, with a title that promised more than it delivered. | Lit Hub History

• Sophie Vershbow digs into how, exactly, a book becomes a New York Times bestseller. | Esquire

• “Le Carré attributed his skill as a writer, and as a spy, to a childhood under siege.” Sam Adler-Bell on John le Carré’s letters, and his lifelong struggle with his father’s legacy. | The Baffler

• Cognitive psychologist and poet Keith Holyoak considers the poetic potential of AI. | The MIT Press Reader

• Hanif Abdurraqib considers what Angels in the Outfield taught him about ghosts and the afterlife. | The Believer

  Article continues after advertisement

• Remembering lesbian pulp fiction author Marijane Meaker. | The Guardian

• “Had I, in my research, eaten so many sweets in the past forty-eight hours that I was anesthetized to their reverie-inducing qualities?” Dispatches from a Proust-inspired weekend. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: A conversation with poet Robin Coste Lewis • Considering CokeMachineGlow.com and the afterlife of the old, weird internet • Read from Marguerite Duras’s newly translated novel, The Easy Life (tr. Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes)