TODAY: In 1375, author of The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, dies.
- Dear readers, thank you for spending some of this bizarre and terrible year with us at Lit Hub dot com: here are the ten stories you read the most. | Lit Hub
- “To breathe oxygen back into the beast of numbness can best be done by the solace of beauty, and art.” Rick Bass on our deep winter solstice dreams and the spring to come. | Lit Hub Nature
- What 2020 children’s book roundups are missing: Sara B. Franklin on the best kids’ reads of this pandemic year. | Lit Hub
- Parul Sehgal on Raven Leilani’s Luster, Merve Emre on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and more of the Best Book Reviews of 2020. | Lit Hub, Book Marks
- Facing crisis together: Alice Bohling on the revolutionary potential of mutual aid. | Lit Hub Politics
- “What kind of jerk-off would want to go to a sentence festival, anyway?” Does Goodreads have a problem with books by women, about women? | Lit Hub
- “Telepathic communication is not some great secret… It is the most natural way any of us can connect with each other.” Kelly Conaboy on the intuition-based work of the animal communicator. | Lit Hub Science
- How the tweeness of e.e. cummings’s “little treat” manages to transcend holiday kitsch. | Lit Hub
- “To be a Chicanao poet is to be dealing with the politics of identity as irony.” Lorna Dee Cervantes on the interplay between Beat and Chicano poetry. | Lit Hub
- “Putting together a novel is essentially putting together the lives of strangers I’m coming to know. In some ways it’s not unlike putting together my own life.” Ann Patchett on friendship, cancer, the pandemic, magic mushrooms, and Tom Hanks. | Harper’s
- Veteran editors Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau are revamping Spiegel & Grau as an independent publishing house. | The New York Times
- “Let’s get this death thing straight.” Vanessa Guignery on her journey through the papers of Julian Barnes. | Ransom Center Magazine
- If you’re upset that the Bad Sex Awards got canceled, please enjoy these bad-on-purpose substitute contenders, written by the likes of T Kira Madden, Rebecca Makkai, and Courtney Maum. | Electric Literature
- “If you want to know the story of a place, walk it.” Craig Mod on storytelling and long-distance walking. | Chicago Review of Books
- “Very few people will talk about Lennon’s dark past, his violent side, his mistreatment toward women.” Lucía Benavides reckons with a complicated legacy. | Los Angeles Review of Books
