Lit Hub Daily: December 15, 2021

• They will be missed: an incomplete list of the writers, editors, and great literary minds we lost in 2021. | Lit Hub

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• A girl named Silence, a sword-wielding princess-pirate, and more medieval tales that should immediately be made into movies. | Lit Hub Film

• “Write long, enflamed emails about necessity of cutting car chase. Enumerate other, cheaper scenes that could replace car chase.” Tom Bissell’s guide for how to write (almost) anything. | Lit Hub Humor

• Should “Christian fiction” be welcomed into the mainstream? A non-religious reader of the genre makes the case. | Lit Hub

• If the “beleaguered and tried” Brontës could experience creative awe, writes Emily Willingham, odds are we can, too. | Lit Hub Science

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• Johanna Hanink probes the work of oft-overlooked Greek writer Andreas Karkavitsas, whose novel The Archaeologist “would seem to literalize Freud’s metaphor of psychotherapy as excavation.” | Lit Hub

• Sally Rooney, Kazuo Ishiguro, Colson Whitehead, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jonathan Franzen, and Lauren Groff all feature among the Best Reviewed Fiction of 2021. | Book Marks

• Silicon Valley spies and Cold War slow-burns: the Best Espionage Fiction of 2021. | CrimeReads

• This is what it’s like to have your book banned by the local school board. | Slate

• “Americans still know very little about the Philippines.” Eric Gamalinda and Luis H. Francia on the genesis of AAWW’s Filipino American literary anthology. | The Margins

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• “In 1920, Zamyatin could not yet imagine a tyranny of chaos.” Masha Gessen on Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose novel We both foresaw and underestimated totalitarianism. | The New Yorker

• Ingrid Rojas Conteras talks to Naima Coster, Alexandra Kleeman, R. O. Kwon, Laura van den Berg, and Bryan Washington about their preferred metaphors for novel writing. | Catapult

• Purdue University’s English department is in crisis, and facing an uncertain future. | Inside Higher Ed

• A New York state ethics panel has determined that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo must return millions of dollars in book earnings. | CBS News

• “If I fall in love with a book, I never worry about sending it out.” Douglas Stuart on finding success with Shuggie Bain. | Publishers Weekly

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Also on Lit Hub: Ayana Contreras on the radical legacy of Curtis Mayfield • On the 1930 sound film that gave Greta Garbo a voice • Read from Christine Angot’s newly translated novel, An Impossible Love (tr. Armine Kotin Mortimer)