Lit Hub Daily: January 6, 2022

• “To love something is to long for it.” Xochitl Gonzalez on leaving Brooklyn in order to write about it. | Lit Hub

  Article continues after advertisement

• Just how good can a 41-year-old rookie tennis player get? Scarlett Thomas decided to find out. | Lit Hub Sports

• Kathryn Barker recommends five evocative Shakespeare retellings. | Lit Hub

• “Nature is not sectioned off in this nonfiction, not treated as though it were separate from daily lives, or as though shared survival was not the most intimate thing imaginable.” Ingrid Horrocks on finding new ways to write about the world. | Lit Hub Nature

• “The past is also pretty queer.” Beatrice Hitchman’s reading list of queer historical fiction. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

  Article continues after advertisement

• Anne Enright on Ulysses, Patricia Lockwood on Knausgaard, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• “Somewhere towards the 1960s the culture simply ran out of ways to shock.” Sam Kahn on J.M. Coetzee and the limits of taboo breaking. | 3:AM Magazine

• Apparently, Pablo Neruda was almost denied the Nobel Prize because of his odes to Stalin. | The Guardian

• A brief history of the “enthralled imitations” of famous writers, from T.S. Eliot’s Chekhovian pince-nez to Beckett’s Joyce cosplay. | Times Literary Supplement

• “This is a question of focus, and who we writers and readers have decided are worthy subjects of our attention and money.” Alex Sujong Laughlin considers the power dynamics of the media landscape. | Poynter

  Article continues after advertisement

• Dean Rader and Victoria Chang explore new poetry by Joan Naviyuk Kane. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Danika Ellis defends recommending books before you read them. | Book Riot

• Laura Miller analyzes two recent feminist spins on The Great Gatsby. | Slate

• The FBI has arrested Filippo Bernardini, who is accused of stealing hundreds of unpublished book manuscripts. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Why do we need sleep? • The best of independent presses this January • Read from Daphne Palasi Andreades’ debut novel, Brown Girls