Lit Hub Daily: January 22, 2021

TODAY: In 1893, Kawatake Mokuami, Japanese dramatist of Kabuki dies. 

• • Turns out, there’s a long and shady history of doctors encouraging anti-vaxxers. | Lit Hub History
  • That hollow feeling when Trump left? That’s because he’ll never, ever feel remorse. | Lit Hub Politics
  • “On careful inspection, it is surprisingly difficult to tell what makes a novel, or any piece of writing, truly finished.” Matthew Redmond makes a case for reading unfinished novels (particularly from Austen, Poe, and Dickens). | Lit Hub
  • Ed Tarkington on whiteness and Southern literature. | Lit Hub
  • In praise of crafting as a model for community support. | Lit Hub
  • “For poetry, truth is necessary but not sufficient.” An interview with Martín Espada. | Lit Hub Poetry
  • New titles from William Boyd, Nnedi Okorafor, and Janice P. Nimura all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
  • Peter Handel on the long, unusual career of Russell James, the “Godfather of British noir.” | CrimeReads
  • “Publishers need more Black translator friends.” Aaron Robertson lays out a roadmap for bringing more Black translators and international writers into America’s book industry. | Words Without Borders
  • Elisa Gabbert on Leonora Carrington, whose own experiences in a sanatorium made it into her novel, The Hearing Trumpet, if transformed into “something more fabulist, and much more interesting.” | The Paris Review
  • Please enjoy this deep dive on Emily Dickinson’s hair. | LARB
  • Bridgerton isn’t failing to be Jane Austen—it’s succeeding at being an escapist Regency romance. | HuffPost
  • “Humans’ drive toward beautiful difference is the force that subverts, again and again, the narcissists’ need to consume us all.” Considering Trump in a lineage of villains, literary and otherwise. | Vox
  • Thirteen-year-old Brayden Harrington, who found solidarity with President Joe Biden on the campaign trail over having a stutter, will write a picture book. | The New York Times
  • “If Fitzgerald writes beautifully about White American men, he falls short in writing about White American women, and he knew it.” Min Jin Lee on The Great Gatsby. | New York Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: How 18th-century Bath invented the modern-day spa • “Midnight,” a poem by Frederick Seidel • Read an excerpt from William Boyd’s new novel, Trio.

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