Lit Hub Daily: January 31, 2019

• The Lit Hub staff’s favorite stories of the month, from Mary Oliver to W.B. Yeats to giddiness in art. | Lit Hub
• February’s edition of the Astrology Book Club, featuring long books for a short month, is as spookily accurate as ever. | Lit Hub
• “This dreaminess suffuses throughout the city itself.” Saleem Haddad on leaving London to live Fernando Pessoa’s dreamlife in Lisbon. | Lit Hub
• On the life of Samuel Grynszpan and an act of resistance the Nazis used to justify Kristallnacht. | Lit Hub
• “I’ve always encouraged my daughter to go off and conquer the world, but in building her up, I’d let myself go as a writer.” On finding a way back to writing after years away. | Lit Hub
• Sam Lipsyte’s Hark: gleaming satire OR unfocused bullshit? | Book Marks
• African fantasy, movie sex, self-own feminism, and more in the 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• In which CrimeReads editor (and insufferable New Englander) Dwyer Murphy predicts the outcome of Sunday’s Super Bowl by reading a bunch of crime fiction from Boston and Los Angeles. | CrimeReads
• “I understood that the only way that I could say what I wanted was through imagination—through things I could think of myself.” On Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die and the turn to fiction when fact is too unbelievable. | The Baffler
• The Costa Awards have been announced, making Sally Rooney officially the youngest ever recipient of the Costa Novel Prize. | The Millions
• “I know lots of novelists. Novelists are very nice people. But I’m not a novelist. I’m a storyteller who sometimes writes novels.” Read an interview with Neil Gaiman. | Vanity Fair
• “The closer you interact with people who have more—and even much, much more—than you, the more you kind of feel like they’re mediocre.” What Kathy Wang’s novel Family Trust can teach us about tech culture. | Wired
• Iowa City, a mecca for writers, is becoming a preferred reading spot for Democratic presidential hopefuls. | Iowa City Press-Citizen
• “This is not your typical tattoo convention”: The second Literary Ink Tattoo showcase is happening this weekend in Tennessee. | Chattanooga Pulse
• “You can just cut out the thing that doesn’t work.” Read Jami Attenberg’s letter of recommendation for her hysterectomy. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: A poem from Robert Bly’s Collected Poems • How we use stunning visuals to tell the stories of science • Read a story from Honey in the Carcase