Lit Hub Daily: July 23, 2021

• “I was concerned an actual apocalypse might arrive while my novel about a fictional one was still in copyediting.” Geoff Rodkey on accepting the realities of civilization-ending calamity. | Lit Hub

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• On the opposite of hapless: Arika Okrent explains why negative descriptors tend to outlast their positive counterparts. | Lit Hub

• Nick McDonell talks to Carl Safina about Catholicism, humpback whales, and his new novel, The Council of Animals. | Lit Hub

• “Imagine the 16.7 million gallons of spirits sold in Ohio in 2020. How this mass would crest over the landscape creating joy and sorrow in its wake.” Athena Dixon on family legacies and the long reach of addiction. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise, Hermione Hoby’s Virtue, and Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• “I’m nobody. I’m dog boy. I’m dog boy in this town.” Tommy Swerdlow remembers an intense 3 am conversation with John Candy. | CrimeReads

• “The kind of writing that Malcolm practiced so beautifully had been disappearing for a long time when she died, and today it is nearly gone.” Richard Beck on the work of Janet Malcolm. | N+1

• Mother Monsters: On the portrayal of motherhood in Nightbitch and The Upstairs House. | Bitch

• A reading list for Disability Pride Month. | CLMP

• “Surrealism is, above all, a way of writing driven by a way of being or desiring to be.” Cabo Verdean President Jorge Carlos Fonseca discusses his literary works, his influences, and the relationship between literature and politics. | Words Without Borders

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• Hilton Als on the silence and possibilities of Speedboat. | Granta

• Five people have been arrested in Hong Kong as part of a police crackdown on political speech in books for young readers. | The New York Times

• Tommy Orange profiles Wes Studi, “the biggest star we’ve ever had in the Native acting world.” | GQ

• Piper French breaks down the climate-driven work of Alexandra Kleeman, in which “individual despair, systemic corruption and eco-apocalypse all threaten, and denial persists unabated.” | High Country News

Also on Lit Hub: From Yaa Gyasi to Joan Silber, Beth Kissileff finds consolation in reading • K.E. Semmel on translating Mathilde Walter Clark’s Lone Star • Read from Andrew Palmer’s latest novel, The Bachelor