Lit Hub Daily: December 19, 2023

• “Protecting students from books containing sexual acts does not protect them from performing sexual acts.” Jane Smiley talks to an Iowa high school newspaper about book banks, after her novel A Thousand Acres was banned from Iowa City schools. | Lit Hub Politics
• From literary hats to Elizabeth Koch’s Perception Box, we continue our countdown of the biggest literary stories of the year. | Lit Hub
• “Too many times audiences leave a theater after seeing an adaptation of a novel believing they had just experienced some approximation of the original… in the case of a writer like Alasdair Gray, it is tragically false.” Why you should definitely read Poor Things, even after seeing Poor Things. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• “Once human beings know something, we think we’ve always known it—like the discovery of irony by a child, it’s a one-way door.” Laurie Stone on madeleines. | The Paris Review

• Tajja Isen ponders the enigma of how to sell a book. | The Walrus

• Nina Siegal on the life of Curt Bloch, a German Jew who created 95 issues of a magazine while hiding from the Nazis in an attic. | The New York Times

• Kathy Acker masturbated here: Jack Skelley reports from the celebration of the donation of the author’s desk to the Poetic Research Bureau. | LARB

Also on Lit Hub: It’s our last (but not least) new books roundup of the year • Louise Kennedy on discovering fiction’s complex emotional truths • On the 17th-century witch trials of the Arctic Circle