Lit Hub Daily: January 23, 2020

• “For generations, Neapolitans have grown up with death—and the dead—as an integral part of everyday life.” Luca Benavides on confronting that deepest of human fears. | Lit Hub
• Garth Greenwell’s “genius for sentence-level work.” Christian Kiefer on grammar as meaning-maker in Cleanness. | Lit Hub
• Everyone can be a book reviewer—but should they? Philippa Chong surveys professional book critics. | Lit Hub
• Friendship and family over mafé: Maryse Condé on the iconic African dish that conjures a thousand homes. | Lit Hub Food
• “Is it any wonder that criminals, thieves, murderers, and con artists headlined some of the most popular crime fiction of the 1970s?” Nathan Nance on the crime fiction of a paranoid decade. | CrimeReads
• Parul Sehgal on American Dirt, Colm Tóibín on Garth Greenwell’s return to Bulgaria, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• On Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, and the fraught political tradition of the Great American Novel. | Post45
• Virtual book clubs, IRL conversations, and more ways to find your new favorite book. | Forge
• “The most necessary conversation about masculinity is also the conversation that makes men feel least comfortable”: What happens when male writers confront toxic masculinity? | The Walrus
• In news that helps no one at this point: apparently Game of Thrones was supposed to conclude with the release of a series of movies, not on the small screen, according to George R. R. Martin. | CNET
• From fiction to memoir, here are 24 new books by black authors. | Essence
• At the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, ranch hands, rodeo riders, and poets of all varieties gather to redefine what it means to be a cowboy in the modern era.| Alta
• Tracing Virginia Woolf’s recent influence on fashion, from a show at a Viennese opera house to the upcoming Met gala. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Wole Soyinka on Yoruba weddings, Nigerian movies, and making traditions new • When a man took a joke in a Pepsi ad seriously, chaos ensued • Read from Stephen Wright’s latest novel Processed Cheese.