Lit Hub Daily: January 31, 2020

• How we learned to start fearing the bomb, again: Fred Kaplan on the nuclear first-strike dilemma. | Lit Hub
• The mysteries of color, how not to get murdered in a quaint English village, and more of the Lit Hub staff’s favorite stories of the month. | Lit Hub
• A day in the life of a writer and human rights advocate Murat Çelikkan, another Turkish journalist in prison for “unspecified reasons.” | Lit Hub
• Steady your teetering TBR piles for these February books, as recommended by Lit Hub contributors. | Lit Hub
• “We’re coexisting amid a chemical soup of manufactured environmental toxins”: Donna Jackson Nakazawa on immunity, microglial cells, and social media. | Lit Hub
• We’ve (favorably) judged these January books by their covers. | Lit Hub
• Van Jensen remembers his time on the crime beat in Little Rock, Arkansas. | CrimeReads
• New titles from Paul Yoon, Christopher Bollen, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Caroline Moorehead all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has granted $4.5 million to the Academy of American Poets—a.k.a. the largest grant ever made by a philanthropic institution to support poets in the U.S. | The New York Times
• Australia’s most lucrative literary prize, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, went to first-time playwright S. Shakthidharan and his co-writer Eamon Flack for Counting and Cracking, about Sri Lankan immigrants in Australia. | The Guardian
• Meet the group of female writers that has been a driving force in Philaelphia’s literary resurgence. | Philadelphia Magazine
• After decades of rejection, 80-year-old Georgia-based author Roberta George published her first novel, The Day’s Heat. | Indiana Gazette
• “In her heyday, Russ was known as a raging man-hater.” On the feminist sci-fi of Joanna Russ. | The New Yorker
• Ahead of Black History Month, which starts on Saturday, Bay Area authors are reading and reflecting on Lesley Nneka Arimah, Jan Willis, and others. | San Francisco Chronicle
• Here’s the deal with Bookshop, the startup that wants to “anti-disrupt” the online bookselling business and help indie bookstores. | Wired

Also on Lit Hub: Roxane Gay on the history of women and the Oscars • How Robert Bly helped create a thriving ecosystem of Minnesota writers • Read a story by Hannah Lillith Assadi from the collection Take Us to a Better Place.