Lit Hub Daily: January 31, 2018

• We need to talk about the fantasy of the writer’s life: Rosalie Knecht on the postwar aesthetic of glamorous decay that haunts us all still. | Literary Hub
• T.J. Stiles: How do you explain this national tragedy? This moment of Trump? (You start by looking back at 400 years of genocide, expulsion, imprisonment, and opportunistic tribalism.) | Literary Hub
• On our obsession with lost and mysterious books, and how they often disappoint. | Literary Hub
• “Last year I covered a book that I hated so much I was literally weeping as I turned the pages, but I still read the whole damn thing.” Critic Marion Winik on the ups and downs of book reviewing. | Book Marks
• “As recently as a decade ago, it would have seemed unlikely, even outlandish, that a middle-aged classics don would end up so famous and, by and large, so loved.” On the making of Mary Beard. | The Guardian
• Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, Laura Ingalls Wilder: 19 of the best westerns ever written. | Outdoor Life
• How James McCourt’s novel of the AIDS pandemic, Time Remaining, “preserves a vibrant strain of queer culture that came within an inch of extinction.” | The New Yorker
• “Four very thin trees stand above their own reflections and hesitate, as cold girls do. She thinks of rhymes for girls do. Whirls through. Pearls anew.” Read a new short story by Anne Carson. | Brick
• “I think it’s hard now, after a whole generation or even two has been influenced by Carver. . . to understand how different What We Talk About When We Talk About Love felt when it was first published.“ Brian Evenson on Raymond Carver. | Fanzine
• “What had happened to the writer I’d been? She had self-destructed. She was gone.” Alyssa Knickerbocker on writing, motherhood, and the X-Men. | Tin House
• “Sometimes, the pressure gets to them; sometimes the lit-bro lashes out.” Miles Klee on the “Shitty Women in Publishing” list and the agony of the “persecuted” lit-bro. | Mel Magazine

Also on Literary Hub: A poem by Rosie Schaap, visiting a Parisian literary hotel, and an excerpt from Tom Malmquist’s novel In Every Moment We are Still Alive.