Lit Hub Daily: January 13, 2022

• “‘High-Risk.’ Was I that? What did those words even mean?” Edgar Gomez on sex, desire, and going on PrEP. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• David Hollander on finding something deeply personal in the philosophical novel. | Lit Hub

• “The true story of the diary’s composition reveals how much thought and effort Anne put into writing something that would have meaning to readers in the future—us.” Leigh Stein on reading Anne Frank in quarantine. | Lit Hub

• Miscommunication, misunderstanding, and missed opportunities: Lewis R. Gordon on talking about Black consciousness. | Lit Hub

• Matthew Eng reframes The Postman Always Rings Twice—and its three film adaptations—from a “dark and torrid tale” to a love story. | Lit Hub Film

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• Peter Mann on the wild boy gangs of Weimar Berlin. | CrimeReads

• Andrea Long Chu on Hanya Yanagihara, Claire Dederer on Jami Attenberg, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• “Reading A Little Life, one can get the impression that Yanagihara is somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants.” Andrea Long Chu considers Hanya Yanagihara’s novels and her relationship to her gay male characters. | Vulture

• “When readers look to writings in other languages, what do they seek?” Angie Chau on the under-translated biji wenxue genre—Chinese literature of daily life. | Public Books

• Casey Cep explores Tema Stauffer’s photographs of the real places that gave rise to Southern fictions. | The New Yorker

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• “There’s a kind of necessary amnesia that sets in after you finish writing a novel. Like childbirth, you must forget; the future requires it of you.” Sara Freeman on writing something new. | Granta

• Jessica Swoboda and Kamran Javadizadeh kick off Criticism in Public, The Point’s new series speaking to “public writing, academic scholarship and literary criticism.” | The Point

• Cara Blue Adams breaks down a linked story collection’s ability to “shine a light on specific moments in a character’s life without necessarily needing to create connective tissue between them.” | BOMB

• Alafair Burke highlights books on amnesia and human memory. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Hannah Lilith Assadi on the hauntings of our pasts • Emily St. John Mandel and showrunner Patrick Somerville talk about the making of Station Eleven • Read from Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s latest novel, The History of Man