Lit Hub Daily: February 7, 2019

• Ten contemporary Dickensian novels to slake your thirst for plucky orphans, complex subplots, and goofy, illustrative names. | Lit Hub
• Contemporary workplace culture is toxic… but maybe not fatal? Matt Haig on the lows and highs of making a living. | Lit Hub
• “When WWI began in August 1914, one of its immediate consequences for Proust was that publishing houses closed.” On the anxiety and vanity of Marcel Proust, debut novelist. | Lit Hub
• What if all writing is just drafts, forever? Joseph Scapellato on the infinite manifestations of a single novel. | Lit Hub
• Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective: smart, gristly fun OR cliché-ridden and strained? | Book Marks
• Hari Kunzru on delusional Brexiteers, Matt Taibbi on dangerously bored billionaires, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• “Nedra Tyre’s crime fiction reflects the Southern Lady ethos even as it also stands apart from it.” Sarah Weinman on Nedra Tyre, the crime writer who killed with kindness. | CrimeReads
• “How do you wrestle with a thing you just. Can’t. Defeat?” Highlights from a conversation between Victor LaValle, N.K. Jemisin, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sam J Miller, and Alice Sola Kim. | Tor
• “I am going to a strange country, and yet, in a way, I am going home.” Sally Wen Mao on Anna May Wong and the Chinese-American qipao. | NYLON
• How to read more books, according to Reddit. | Lifehacker
• What were the great little mags of the Harlem Renaissance? | Bookriot
• What will happen to Dan Mallory? Hint: Probably not much. | Publisher’s Weekly
• Iraqi activist and author Alaa Mashzoub, an outspoken critic of foreign interference in Iraq, was shot and killed by unknown assailants. | Idaho Statesman
• “Given the choice to go the rest of my life without porn or without surprisingly hot sex scenes in literary novels, I would sacrifice porn.” 33 literary books with great lesbian sex scenes. | Autostraddle

Also on Lit Hub: Rhiana Yazzie and Brandon Hobson on Fiction/Non/Fiction • A mediocre violinist on playing for “The Composer” • Ten great small press books you should read, according to Philadelphia’s Joseph Fox Bookshop • Read from The Familiars