Lit Hub Daily: January 6, 2023

• When imagination is an act of resistance: Michelle Nijhuis considers Sarah Polley’s new film adaptation of Women Talking. | Lit Hub Film & TV

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• “Of all the trades in the world, there is only one that really suits me. That of eating, drinking, sleeping, playing, and wandering around from morning till night.” Alessandro Delfanti reads the original Pinocchio as a radical anti-work story. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Rachel Swartzmann muses on the sanctity of journaling in the age of digital (over)sharing. | Lit Hub

• 18 new paperbacks hitting shelves this month. | The Hub

• Tom Crewe’s The New Life, Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens, and Matthew Dennison’s Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• “There’s a clear change in the comedic sensibilities, an altered shade of the absurd.” Alexander Sammartino considers the evolution of George Saunders’s comedy. | The Millions

• Matt Haig reflects on his midlife autism diagnosis: “I always seem to write about people who look like they should fit in but somehow don’t.” | The New York Times

• “The very first version of a public library was created by and for middle- and upper-class white men, and this has permeated libraries for centuries.” Amanda Oliver dissects the library’s systemic failures. | Electric Lit

• Gal Beckerman explores the “beautifully anachronistic” partnership of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. | The Atlantic

• Ever wondered how James Patterson writes 31 books at the same time? | GQ 

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• “I’ve loved experiencing the page as a map, as something to be wandered across.” Lee Lai on the craft of comics. | Granta

• Chanan Tigray on the career of Michael Langlois, “perhaps the most versatile—and unorthodox—biblical scholar of his generation.” | Smithsonian Magazine

Also on Lit Hub: How women’s contributions to fighting fascism were forgotten • Gerald Stern on the accidental beginnings of poems • Read from Anton Shammas’s newly translated novel, Arabesques (tr. Vivian Eden)