Lit Hub Daily: February 7, 2020

• Brilliance and blind spots: Gabrielle Bellot on rereading Joan Didion in this hard American winter of 2020. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “I would rebel, and hard.” Richard Wagamese on anti-Native racism and deciding to fight back. | Lit Hub Politics
• Sophia Leonard details Truman Capote’s unfinished investigation on Russian socialites (which would make for an amazing Netflix series). | Lit Hub
• “If the city ever knew what it was, it kept forgetting.” Sam Wasson the early day of Los Angeles detective fiction. | Lit Hub
• Some very doable steps toward a plant-based kitchen: Tips for batch cooking, meat alternatives, and more. | Lit Hub Food
• “With each passing awards season, [the Oscars] become ever more irrelevant.” The 2020 Oscar nominations prove that Hollywood still hasn’t seen through the smoke. | Lit Hub Film
• “I am crazy on the sea.” Finding liberation in the early years of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. | Lit Hub History
• Aya de Leon on American Dirt, commercial fiction, and the war between genre and literature. | CrimeReads
• New titles from Lidia Yuknavitch, Ben Okri, and Vivian Gornick all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Read a profile of Vikram Chandra, who built a program named Granthika to keep track of his complicated novels. | Wired
• Of course Dorothy Parker got fired from Vanity Fair for skewering the structures of the patriarchy (in a review of a Somerset Maugham play, no less). | Public Domain Review
• “One gift an artist might give to other artists is a demonstration of how to make work without shame.” Zadie Smith on Kara Walker. | NYRB
• What the American Dirt controversy revealed about Oprah, her book club, capitalism, and the iconography of pain. | Longreads
• Have you ever wanted to view life through Gregor Samsa’s eyes? A virtual reality installation in Prague lets users imagine life as a Kafkaesque bug. | The Hindu
• So you’re a white writer who wants to write outside your race! Here are some points to consider. | Brittle Paper
• Ten young readers recommend 10 books for kids to read this winter. | TIME

Also on Lit Hub: How Nazism’s rise in Europe spurred anti-Semitic movements in the US • Searching for queerness in the corners of history • Read an excerpt from Tola Rotimi Abraham’s debut novel Black Sunday.