Lit Hub Daily: January 14, 2021

TODAY: In 1897, Wasif Jawhariyyeh, whose memoir The Diaries of Wasif Jawhariyyeh spans over six decades from 1904 to 1968, is born.

• • • Toiling by candlelight for five years won’t make it any more of a masterpiece: Mateo Askaripour makes a case for writing fast. | Lit Hub Craft
    • Julia Cameron wants you to take yourself on an Artist Date (when the world is open again, obviously). | Lit Hub
    • Madeleine Watts on contemporary nature writing, from the 2015 Polar Vortex to last year’s Australian bushfires. | Lit Hub Nature
    • “Someday when I’m getting some sleep again, I may have something to say about precarity.” Jane Ciabattari interviews Caitlin Horrocks. | Lit Hub
    • Where’s a support group when you need one? Justine Cowan considers the anxieties of publishing a memoir. | Lit Hub Memoir
    • How will last week’s attempted coup be taught as history? Samantha Tucker considers rhetorical coverups and culturally responsive education. | Lit Hub
    • In praise of reading promiscuously: Will Self kicks off a new series on how—and why—we read. | Lit Hub
    • Stephen Jackley thought the world was deeply unfair, and set out to change it—by robbing banks and redistributing money. | CrimeReads
    • Keith Donohue on Gabriel Byrne’s elegiac memoir, Ron Charles on a feminist alt-history Western, and more reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
    • “In casting the struggles of his characters as valid, he affirmed that the struggles of the mostly Black women reading him were also valid.” An ode to the late Eric Jerome Dickey. | The Atlantic
    • This former high school English teacher is begging you: Please stop comparing things to 1984. (For one thing, it’s obvious you haven’t read it.) | Electric Literature
    • “A Black face can’t fix what’s wrong with James Bond. Fundamentally, he is a misogynist fantasy and an agent of empire. But what does it mean to be an agent against empire?” How Aya de León shook off established tropes and found her own voice. | Harper’s Bazaar
    • “Everything makes me cry these days. My No Prep Slow Cooker cookbook made me cry yesterday.” An (extremely relatable) interview with Maggie Nelson. | EW
    • You should probably be watching Pretend It’s a City, if only for the story about Fran Lebowitz chewing out another writer for too-convincingly blurbing a book Lebowitz thought was bad. | Vulture
    • John Freeman on the “exaggerations and falsehoods” that make up the mythology of the American West. | Alta
    • Eula Biss recommends essays that push the conventions of an already-unconventional form. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: The great adaptation preview of 2021, featuring Denzel Washington as Macbeth (!) • Jamie Harrison on the role of food in fiction • Read from Olga Grushin’s The Charmed Wife.

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