Lit Hub Daily: January 9, 2019

• “The idea came to me fully formed: One book a month, followed to the letter, to see if self-help really could change my life.” Marianne Power on living by the book(s). | Lit Hub
• Decolonizing lit mags, step one: give your entire budget to Indigenous writers and editors: a conversation about Lifted Brow’s special Blak Brow issue. | Lit Hub
• Bookstore as de facto town hall: an interview with Harrisburg’s (mayor-owned) Midtown Scholar Bookstore. | Lit Hub
• “I want to laugh more this year. I have gotta laugh at some of the bad stuff, too.” Resident librarian Kristen Arnett’s 2019 resolutions are applicable to us all. | Lit Hub
• On the latest episode of Otherppl, Brad Listi talks to Tommy Pico about life on the road, and learning to write. | Lit Hub
• Trust the stars (also, us): January book recommendations based on your zodiac sign. | Lit Hub
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: the New Yorker‘s Jia Tolentino on Edith Wharton, Ling Ma, and Performative Book Talk. | Book Marks
• “Thrillers act as a talisman: if we read it, it won’t come.” Jessica Barry on facing everyday dangers and using crime fiction as a space for female empowerment. | CrimeReads
• “I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader.” On why we shouldn’t just toss old classics with outdated points of view. | New York Times
• Book covers may get all the glory, but the interior book design matters more than you think. | SPINE
• “The internet is furnishing for us an endless catacomb––like Borges’ Library of Babel––where everything will be buried and nothing will ever die. In this world there is no “the death of…” And can a thing like the novel ever really be laid to rest there?” On the death “The Death of” essays. | 3:AM Magazine
• “A tiny, black feminist nerd utopia”: Meet the women hoping to bring a feminist “bookmobile” to their community. | Teen Vogue
• What a go-go dancer’s fan letter to Angela Carter reveals about the author’s contributions to second-wave feminism. | Scroll
• “The space between dystopia and reality is shrinking rapidly; it’s not the future we’re worried about any longer, but the results of our present-day actions and outlooks.” What happens when dystopian fiction gets too real. | Vulture
• “If ‘whom’ miraculously lives, that is fine. If it dies as it likely will now, that’s fine too.” A case for letting words run their courses. | Quartz

Also on Lit Hub: The unexpected literary pleasure of marijuana reviews • Read from Ghost Wall