Lit Hub Daily: January 30, 2020

• On the genius of the “long take”: Paul Yoon revisits five great novels that take place over 48 hours. | Lit Hub
• Atlanta high school English teacher Susan Barber talks to Nick Ripatrazone about the privilege of investing in the next generation (and the chaotic side of learning). | Lit Hub
• “Our brain runs the risk of becoming blind to what it chooses not to see.” How the ways we pay attention change the shape of our brains. | Lit Hub Science
• On the eve of Hay Festival Cartagena, Juan Cardenas and Margarita García Robayo recommend 15 essential Colombian novels to read even if you can’t make the trip. | Lit Hub
• Samuel Freedman rereads Blue Collar Aristocrats, the 1975 book that “foretold the construction of Trump’s impregnable base among white working-class men.” | Lit Hub Politics
• Neil Nyren on the wild, corrupt, uproarious world of Carl Hiaasen’s Florida. | CrimeReads
• Hannah Giorgis on Jeanine Cummins, Jia Tolentino on new minimalism, Ron Charles on Paul Yoon, and more of the reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
• Dan Kois would really, really like everyone to read this “fantasy masterpiece” by a New Zealand which is why he has written a “semi-deranged blog post to attempt to browbeat American publishers into acquiring it.” | Slate
• The New York Public Library has just acquired a collection of Virginia Woolf’s letters, postcards, and manuscripts. | The New Yorker
• Maaza Mengiste lists the 10 books that helped her understand the consequences of war as she wrote The Shadow King. | The Guardian
• A new survey from Lee and Low reveals a lack of progress on diversity in publishing, where “the industry’s interns are vastly more diverse than the industry itself.” | Publishers Weekly
• “Now is the time to call out the publishing industry (as we have, as we do, as we keep having to do) for its racism and small-mindedness about who gets published and who does not.” Wendy Ortiz on the publishing gatekeepers. | Gay Mag
• What did Shakespeare intend with his play Timon of Athens, by many standards an outlier in the playwright’s canon? A new production attempts to make this clear. | The New York Review of Books
• Do our home libraries suggest more interest in visuals and design than book culture? | Architectural Digest

Also on Lit Hub: The professor who smuggled intellectuals out of Nazi-occupied France • Jack London’s call to service and humanism • Read an excerpt from Michael Sears’s short story in the Bay Area Issue of ZYZZYVA.