Lit Hub Daily: January 21, 2022

• Meet this year’s finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. | The Hub

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• “No one on earth seems to know what to do with their hands.” Twelve writers tell Rachel Krantz the stories behind their author photos. | Lit Hub

• “My family is my fuel, and my family is my distraction.” Mira Ptacin on art-making and domestic labor in Bergman’s Island. | Lit Hub Film

• A.E. Rooks investigates the complicated history of the Black Joke, the ship that battled the slave trade. | Lit Hub History

• EXCLUSIVE: Watch David Strathairn and Abraham Verghese discuss Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser,” from this evening’s episode of Poetry in America. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

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• Brian Cox’s Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto, and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Glen S. Miranker may have the best Sherlockian collection in private hands. Here are some highlights. | CrimeReads

• Tara Isabella Burton revisits The Secret History, “a meticulously constructed, often exquisitely written novel that is suffused with such bleak nihilism that it borders on the diabolical.” | Gawker

• Lucy Sante discusses her transition, and changes both superficial and metaphysical. | Vanity Fair

• “Her genius was at exploring the paradoxes and contradictions in the stories we tell ourselves.” Darryl Pinckney on Joan Didion, “our lady of deadpan.”  | NYRB

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• Playwrights and mandoo: Hanya Yanagihara’s dream dinner party. | Bon Appetit

• These books are excellent resources for queer parents and families. | HuffPost

• Christopher Atamian looks at the generation “of wonderfully vibrant, experimental Armenian writers” transforming their country’s literary scene. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal library is for sale in an auction that will run until January 27. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Bernardine Evaristo on the richness of older women’s stories • Mads Nygaard on finding his book’s American family • Read from Beverly Gologorsky’s latest novel, Can You See the Wind?