Lit Hub Daily: January 4, 2021

TODAY: In 1965, Thomas Stearns Eliot dies.

• “[I]n writing, with skill and attention, we can sometimes evoke a singular moment of clarity”: Randon Billings Noble on the tricky business of rendering epiphanies in nonfiction. | Lit Hub
• Are you high- or low-amplitude? Camilla Pang on wave patterns as personality types. | Lit Hub
• “Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic”: A poem by Kaveh Akbar, from Pilgrim Bell. | Lit Hub
• “We were the crowd in an opera waiting for our cue to shout in unison when the time for it came.” Arthur Miller on the surreal, ideological violence underlying the 1968 Democratic Convention. | Lit Hub
• “Each time, I have found shocks of recognition on the page, but they are always new ones, never the ones I was remembering.” Jenny Offill on a lifetime of rereading Mrs. Dalloway. | The New Yorker
• Was 2020 the year of the villainous white mother in fiction? | Vulture
• George Saunders discusses his affinity for Russian short stories, his distaste for social media, and the allure of the doorstopper. | The Guardian
• “The literary equivalent of falling down an internet rabbit hole”: Why Charles Portis’ Masters of Atlantis is the perfect book for the QAnon age. | Slate
• “I am a novelist living his novel. My life imitates my novel.” On the imprisonment of the Turkish historical novelist Ahmet Altan. | The New Republic
• The past year has been one of reckoning for France’s largely white, scandal-plagued publishing industry. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: The early women pioneers of trail hiking • Watching Cuties, teaching Lolita, and examining moral panic • Read an excerpt from Claudia Hernández’s newly translated novel Slash and Burn (trans. by Julia Sanches).

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