Lit Hub Daily: December 8, 2022

• Leila Philip elucidates the sacred weirdness (and evolutionary puzzle) of the beaver. | Lit Hub Nature

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• For #ReadingAfrica Week, five writers and publishers discuss the continent’s literary landscape: “I still think North Americans don’t understand that Africa is a continent, and there are a lot of stereotypes we’re fighting.” | Lit Hub

• Xandra Ellin on She Said, the #MeToo Cinematic Universe, and the problem of letting Hollywood codify the movement. | Lit Hub Criticism

• The best reviewed nonfiction of the year (according to Book Marks). | Lit Hub

• “It is an erudite despair.” Why (most) critics hated The Waste Land when it was published. | Lit Hub Poetry

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• In this week’s Life Advice for Book Lovers, Dorothea recommends reads for easing the dread… about a friend’s terrible taste in men. | Lit Hub

• Sally Rooney considers James Joyce and Jane Austen: “The Ulysses I present to you this evening might sound suspiciously like a novel about attractive young people in their twenties and thirties hanging around Dublin.” | The Paris Review

• Andrew Warner breaks down the long and fascinating history of alphabet reform in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. | JSTOR Daily

• “People are being paid less than half a living wage for their creative labour.” Joanne Harris on the problem of low pay for writers. | The Guardian

• Seven poets on their relationship with revision. | Iron Horse Review

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• “The image of Wodehouse as some sort of manic literary beaver is one of the singular pleasures of reading his work.” Dan Brooks on the “brilliant hackwork” of P.G. Wodehouse. | Gawker

• David Canfield talks to Sarah Polley about her new adaptation of Women Talking. | Vanity Fair

• Aimee Levitt resists The Silver Palate Cookbook, whose “novel and aspirational” recipes changed home cooking. | Eater

Also on Lit Hub: 8 books that seek to unsettle the reader • What running has taught me about writing (and vice versa) • Read from Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s newly translated novel, Animal Life (tr. Brian FitzGibbon)