Lit Hub Daily: January 17, 2019

• “It all has to be the good part.” Sam Lipsyte on writer’s block, his old man name, and the key to good writing. | Lit Hub
• “McPhee is the diamond that yearns to become fresh pencil lead. He is, at core, a piner, one who pines.” Seven ways of looking at John McPhee. | Lit Hub
• Visiting a literary outpost at the end of Long Island: where Capote, Steinbeck, and more took refuge. | Lit Hub
• “The human voice is just a sound in the air, and yet it has built bridges from ignorance to knowledge.” A testament to the miraculous power of reading aloud. | Lit Hub
• Where New York’s single literary girls lived: Amy Rowland recalls her time in a women’s-only boarding house. | Lit Hub
• Leila Slimani and the boredom of bad girl lit, Tessa Hadley as a modern-day Virginia Woolf, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• “These books corrupted and corroded me, providing a clue towards what could make crime fiction essential.” British crime writer and bookseller Joseph Knox on how he first fell in love with American Noir. | CrimeReads
• “The market is flush with psychopathic she-beasts and irredeemably miserable vipers.” Against the trend of the one-dimensional “villainous bitch” in novels. | Vulture
• Amazon claims it’s not actually making writers poor, thank you very much. | The Guardian
• “I think the contemporary world that has claimed him needs to read him more deeply.” Hilton Als on curating an exhibit of James Baldwin portraits. | The New Yorker
• On Idra Novey’s Those Who Knew, Kate Walbert’s His Favorites, and Anna Burns’s Milkman—three recent novels that tackle the “open secret” of sexual violence and harassment. | The Atlantic
• “No one knows what is truly authentic, or how to define that anymore, and this interests me. When and how does the image truly affirm? Is it possible to represent the self at all?” Jenny Xie and Sally Wen Mao in conversation. | AAWW
• “A serenely irreverent perspective on a patriarchal culture”: On Colette, author and early feminist icon. | The Conversation
• On Józef Czapski’s Proust lectures in a Soviet prison camp. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: “Meeting You in the First Place Was Great Though,” a poem from Rachael Allen’s debut collection • Reading Women‘s most anticipated books of 2019 • Read from Still in Love