Lit Hub Daily: January 25, 2022

• Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf, we will always need you. Emma Knight finds comfort in the diaries of a master. | Lit Hub

• “It was a power ballad missile of queasy erotic awakening aimed straight at my 14-year-old heart.” Summer Brennan revisits the genius of Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).” | Lit Hub Music

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• Morgan Thomas against “place as character”—and in favor of something more dynamic. | Lit Hub Craft

• How “drunkard” narratives by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman fueled the early temperance movement. | Lit Hub History

• Jessamine Chan and Crystal Hana Kim discuss American parenting culture, writing Asian American protagonists, and more. | Lit Hub

• “It was like an über- nerdy On the Road.” Oliver Roeder tracks the highs and lows of competitive Scrabble. | Lit Hub Sports?

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• Sequoia Nagamatsu talks to Jane Ciabattari about writing the grief and connections of an enduring pandemic. | Lit Hub

• “Even the act of creation, the attempts at creation, creates all these ripples in the world.” Esmé Weijun Wang interviews Andrew Garfield. | The Believer

• Read a profile of Kim Stanley Robinson, whose science fiction envisions both the dire problems of the future, and their solutions. | The New Yorker

• “Unlike actual celebrities, they are rarely famous for nothing.” On the celebrity sentence. | 3 Quarks Daily

• Ruth Franklin discusses Shirley Jackson’s diverse career and critical renaissance. | Guernica

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• Laura Portwood-Stacer on the struggle of submitting a book proposal. | The Chronicle of Higher Education

• What’s behind a conservative-led campaign to ban books that address “race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities” from schools? | The Guardian

• Bernardine Evaristo recommends books on Black British identity. | The Week

Also on Lit Hub: 20 new titles coming to bookstores near you • Francesca Stavrakopoulou on “divine footprints” • Read from Isabel Allende’s newly translated novel, Violeta (tr. Frances Riddle)