Lit Hub Daily: December 9, 2021

• MFA discourse, creepy poems, Steinbeck’s unpublished werewolf novel, and more of the Biggest Literary Stories of the Year, 50 to 31. | Lit Hub 

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• “I used to feel about motherhood the way I feel about dying.” Mira Ptacin on the fleetingness of youth and the surreality of motherhood. | Lit Hub Parenting

• Megan Mayhew Bergman wonders if the “planet’s failing health calls for new belief systems and spiritual practices.” | Lit Hub Climate Change

• All speech is dream speech and more of opera’s “unwritten, irrational” rules of gravity. | Lit Hub Music

• David Palumbo-Liu considers the necessary energy of eruptive protest. | Lit Hub 

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• “It was risky to open a cultural place just three months after the liberation.” And yet, the Mosul Book Forum became a hub of expression in a city recovering from the Islamic State. | Lit Hub

• Haruki Murakami, Brandon Taylor, Elizabeth McCracken, Kevin Barry, and Lily King all feature among the Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2021. | Book Marks

• The best crime novels of 2021, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. | CrimeReads

• Listen to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2021 Nobel Prize lecture in literature. | The Nobel Prize

• Mai Der Vang and Sophia Terazawa in conversation about their work, the impact of difficult histories, and the way governments warp the retelling of the past. | The Margins 

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• How pottery can teach writers about the drafting process. | Catapult

• “Blaming Sebold will not get us any closer to a world in which a story like this can’t be told.” Camonghne Felix on Anthony Broadwater, Alice Sebold, and the carceral justice system. | The Cut

• Maurice Carlos Ruffin left his job as a corporate lawyer to pursue writing, and has no regrets. | Oldster

• Cody Delistraty writes in defense of literary and other fictional monsters. | JSTOR Daily

• Maddie Crum considers Generations, Lucille Clifton’s only work of nonfiction: “an assertive book, a lyric autoethnography.” | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Also on Lit Hub: Polly Crosby revisits her childhood in a small village in Suffolk, England • A poem by Adam Zagajewski (tr. Clare Cavanagh) • Read from Sosuke Natsukawa’s latest novel, The Cat Who Saved Books (tr. Louise Heal Kawai)