Lit Hub Daily: January 3, 2019

• “Watch closely. This is how Black writers live.” Toward an expanded canon of Black literature. | Lit Hub
• “All the people you could have been haunt the bookstore alongside the person you could still become.” On walking into a bookstore in your forties vs. your twenties. | Lit Hub
• An argument for the universal wearing of beards, courtesy Victorian tastemaker Thomas S. Gowing. | Lit Hub
• “I will finish for good, I pledged, by the anniversary of her death.” Honor Moore on finishing the book and conjuring her mother. | Lit Hub
• Biographer John Loughery on how a drug-addled art critic created the most elegant sleuth of the Jazz Age. | CrimeReads
• The enduring enigma of Jean Toomer, Joyce Carol Oates channels Margaret Atwood, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Novels of sleepless nights, midnight poems, and a history of the bed: Marina Benjamin curates the ideal insomniac’s reading list. | The Guardian
• “Don’t call it a Dernaissance.” Sloane Crosley profiles the great Laura Dern. | Vanity Fair
• Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a massive hit—and is now officially the highest single-week grossing American play in Broadway history. | Variety
• “A poem exists between pages of paper, bound by its own internal logic. A lyric arrives from the wider world, laden with decades of meaning and remembered melody”: when song lyrics become literature. | New Statesman
• In honor of the 20th anniversary of You’ve Got Mail, a Nora Ephron reading list. | Longreads
• “A pale imitation of our actual self”: What the Upanishads, ancient Sanskrit texts, tell us about avatars and virtual reality. | Aeon
• Edoardo Ballerini, the English language narrator of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, discusses the audiobook boom. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Sam Sanders on reading, race, and covering politics in America • Reading feminist futurism in the age of the “female” virtual assistant • Read a story from Sam Savage’s new collection, An Orphanage of Dreams