Lit Hub Daily: March 14, 2023

• What the critics have to say about this year’s 30 NBCC Award finalists (spoiler alert: all good things). | Lit Hub

  Article continues after advertisement

• “Book cataloguing is less an art, not really a science, and more of a completely unstandardized, decentralized carnival fire.” Oliver Darkshire on the rare book trade. | Lit Hub

• Happy pub week to these 16 new books. | The Hub

• Ghaith Abdul-Ahad looks behind the curtain of post-Saddam Iraq. | Lit Hub

• This month’s Lit Hub Asks: 5 Writers, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers features Roxanna Asgarian, Jaroslav Kalfař, Victor LaValle, Szilvia Molnar, and Cecile Pin. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

  Article continues after advertisement

• Deborah Treisman talks to Jennifer Egan about her current book projects, playing with structure and voice, her writing group, and more. | The New Yorker

• The Toni Morrison stamp is finally here! | CNN

• Would you steal hundreds of unpublished manuscripts simply for the pleasure of reading them? | The New York Times

• Speaking of which: the case to free the manuscript thief. | The Hub

• Tibetan writer Zangkar Jamyang is serving four years in prison after being arrested by Chinese police for “spreading rumors in internet chat groups.” | Radio Free Asia

  Article continues after advertisement

• Sara Youngblood Gregory looks at femininity and gender roles in post-apocalypse narratives, from The Last of Us to Octavia Butler. | Cosmopolitan

Also on Lit Hub: Elizabeth McKenzie on writing about her geologist mother • Cathleen Schine on finding a charming narrator in a self-conscious age • Read Mieko Kawakami’s short story “The Tongue” (tr. Hitomi Yoshio) from the new issue of Freeman’s