Lit Hub Daily: January 14, 2022

TODAY: In 1963, The Bell Jar is published under Sylvia Plath’s pseudonym, “Victoria Lucas.”    

• To celebrate The Bell Jar’s 59th birthday, here are 59 of its best, weirdest, and most unusual covers. | Lit Hub

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• So… do our dogs really love us? | Lit Hub

• “No one talks about the waiting. How dull it is to get caught up in tragedy, how hungry you get.” Jonathan Gleason on the roots (and complicated aftermath) of violence. | Lit Hub

• Olivia Rutigliano reviews Joel Coen’s solo-directorial debut, The Tragedy of Macbeth, “a starkly fresh take on a story we’ve seen played before us over and over again.” | Lit Hub Film

• “You know I don’t have answers, right? Other than demolishing the whole publishing industry, and rebuilding it.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on writing on your own terms. | Lit Hub

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• New titles from Hanya Yanagihara, Jami Attenberg, and Carl Bernstein all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Marina Magloire considers Lucille Clifton’s memoir, which “encourages us to take seriously the revolutionary spirit of Clifton’s work.” | The Nation

• Take a look at the University of Connecticut’s alternative press collection, including an archive of 1,000 protest buttons. | Atlas Obscura

• “What does it suggest about humanity that, however much we are subjugated, other worlds are always at hand in the quiet of night?” Annie Howard of Ursula K Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. | Boston Review

• “Hope lies in resisting the way the internet and the profiteers are trying to cut off my ability to look backward and forward.” Toward a syllabus for a new world. | Vox

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• “This is nuts. I’m an eighty year old barbarian.” Abigail Thomas on her newest pursuit: spatchcocking chickens. | Oldster

• “Everyone deserves access to the books they seek for self-determination and growth.” Andy Chan and Michelle Dillon call on prisons to stop banning books by Black authors. | Washington Post

• Richard Joseph looks at the present state of the literary hatchet job, which is, he writes, “back with a vengeance.” | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: Annie Dillard on how writers learn to trust instinct • Books about the bond between horses and riders • Read a story from Bernard Maclaverty’s latest collection, Blank Pages

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