Lit Hub Daily: December 17, 2021

• Sensual westerns, surrealist adaptations, and a well-read sociopath: Our favorite literary (and literary-ish) TV shows and movies of 2021. | Lit Hub Film & TV

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• “The following are my favorite poetry books of last year, and I still don’t know how any of them work.” Rabih Alameddine’s year in reading. | Lit Hub Poetry

• Shane Brennan considers how Xenophon’s Anabasis has preserved its appeal to readers over centuries. | Lit Hub Criticism

• In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, everyone is pretending to be a grown-up. Even the grown-ups. | Lit Hub Film

• Tiphanie Yanique on breaking the rules of form… starting with Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. | Lit Hub Craft

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• Haruki Murakami, Alison Bechdel, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Kristen Radtke all feature among the Best Reviewed Graphic Literature and Literature in Translation of 2021. | Book Marks

• “Revolution starts within each of us—in the demands we take up against the world, in the daily fight against nihilism.” Hua Hsu on the revolutionary writing of bell hooks. | The New Yorker

• Read the last interview of Anne Rice. | The New York Times

• “Writing after many years becomes a place you can hide. Because you acquire a certain amount of craft, it allows you to do something while not revealing yourself.” Anne Carson on myth, drawing, and gratitude. | Interview

• Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter consider the history of scripture, before the Bible. | Lapham’s Quarterly

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• “In the writing, I tried to avoid the mistake, which can be easy in a memoir, of presenting myself as an angelic person.” Bernardine Evaristo and Jami Attenberg discuss their new books and their experiences as writers. | EW

• K.W. Colyard on telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. | Book Riot

• Catherine Ricketts explores the echoes of Augustine’s Confessions in Natalie Carnes’s 2020 memoir, Motherhood: A Confession. | Ploughshares

Also on Lit Hub: Interview with an Indie Press: Transit Books • A poem by Lee Young-Ju (tr. Jae Kim) • Read from Dale Maharidge’s debut novel, Burn Coast