Lit Hub Daily: January 23, 2019

• Which is the most literary state? A quantitative examination each state’s prestigious prize haul. | Lit Hub
• “The intersections of librarianship and writing in my life sometimes can feel like a struggle.” Kristen Arnett on navigating life as a “wribrarian” (sorry!).| Lit Hub
• “He does both the work on the page and in the world around him; he is a good literary citizen.” Jami Attenberg and Maurice Ruffin in conversation. | Lit Hub
• “This is the queer erotic: the validation of our bodies as worthy of attention, of desire, of sex.” On the overlooked eroticism of Mary Oliver. | Lit Hub
• “What I wanted: confirmation from someone that it was possible, no, more than possible, likely, no, more than likely, absolutely the case, that my parents had known nothing.” Dani Shapiro on unraveling the mystery of her conception.” | Lit Hub
• On Otherppl, Brad Listi talks to Thomas Kohnstamm about wanderlust, travel writer burn-out, and writing-addiction. | Lit Hub
• Chris Hammer looks at what makes rural Australia such a perfect setting, and introduces us to the new class of Australian crime writers. | CrimeReads
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Madeleine Schwartz on Dawn Powell, Uwe Johnson, and the death of the book critic. | Book Marks
• Home is where the haunt is: Heather Cleary on the fantastic in translated fiction. | Book Marks
• The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards have been announced. | NBCC
• On comp titles, “the most important data that no one outside of publishing has ever heard of,” and how they keep the publishing industry overwhelmingly white. | LARB
• Justin Alvarez on Thomas Glynn’s unpublished, 1,800-page novel about the inmates of Dannemora prison. | The New Yorker
• “We need to imagine the future in order to survive it.” Charlie Jane Anders on why science fiction writers need to write about climate change. | Tor
• “When war and conflict edge closer, Beckett’s writing becomes strangely real and visceral.” On Beckett’s political imagination. | IAI TV
• “We uncapped our pens, and the signing game began”: Billy Collins shares a loving memory of Mary Oliver. | The Paris Review
• Close that library!: The Society of Authors threatened legal action against the Internet Archive for the “unauthorised lending of scanned books” through its Open Library. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Celebrating women in book design on Reading Women • On Aristotle and the idea of “civic friendship” • Read from Holy Lands