Lit Hub Daily: December 22, 2020
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1943, Beatrix Potter, author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, dies.
- It’s been a hell of a year: and here are the ten biggest literary stories of 2020. | Lit Hub
- “I have often asserted that if my job were simply to broadcast his works to the world, I’d die a happy man.” Wow, Nick Offerman really loves Wendell Berry. | Lit Hub Nature
- “We are not saved. We are reprieved.” Todd Gitlin on the defeat of Donald Trump. | Lit Hub Politics
- These are the best international crime novels of 2020. | CrimeReads
- “There are no pleasures to be had here, only a reminder of things that once produced pleasure.” Here then, are the most scathing book reviews of 2020. | Lit Hub, Bookmarks
- Hard to imagine Mary McCarthy’s The Group was dismissed as a “lady-writer’s novel.” And yet. | Lit Hub
- “Have you ever spent a day slumped at your desk, achieving barely anything?” What has—and hasn’t—changed about workplace drinking culture. | Lit Hub Health
- “My English is still Yiddish-rich. I save my father’s witty quips in a file I call ‘Dad’s chochmes.’” Deborah Tannen on finding her father through his relationship with Judaism. | Lit Hub Memoir
- When Tom Seaver came into the big leagues, he came in pitching: on the rookie year of a baseball legend. | Lit Hub Sports
- A mysterious thief—who must be an industry insider—has been targeting authors, agents, and editors in a bizarre, years-long phishing scam. | The New York Times
- “The book seems almost purpose-made for this moment. Marco Polo describes Kublai Kahn’s empire to him, and I sit in my bedroom trying to remember what the inside of a bar sounded like.” On reading Italo Calvino in Boston during a pandemic. | Ploughshares
- “Surrealist art, with its convulsive, outlandish juxtapositions, showed Carrington how to . . . cavort with nonhuman creatures, drawing on their beauty and suffering to make tame ideas about character and plot more porous, elastic, and gloriously unhinged.” Merve Emre on Leonora Carrington. | The New Yorker
- In Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story, a hallmark of holiday season nostalgia, “a darker message is at play that resonates uncannily well today.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “I’ve always believed that I am intrinsically interconnected with the natural world, that as a human I’m part of the ecosystem, not the proper center of it.” Felicia Luna Lemus on the climate crisis and how an Indigenous heritage has influenced her writing. | Chicago Review of Books
- It’s a good season for comfort reads—here are some of Jenny Colgan’s favorites for the holidays. | The Guardian
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