Lit Hub Daily: March 23, 2021

• “People who buy books! What a special category of souls.” Nicola DeRobertis-Theye on coming-of-age in a struggling Berkeley Bookstore. | Lit Hub

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• “I had heard professors talk about the joys of a freer mode of storytelling, writing as exploration, loosey goosey. But I always resisted it.” Andrew J. Graff on learning to go with the flow… in writing and whitewater rafting. | Lit Hub

• In the Japanese mountain town of Yamanaka, Hannah Kirshner observes the intricate craftmanship of turning Urushi trees into lacquer. | Lit Hub

• “Maybe, against all odds and reason, my mother was there in spirit form, waiting to talk to me.” Laura Maylene Walter on the art of belief, from a spiritualist retreat to her debut novel. | Lit Hub

• How Jacqueline Winspear became a mystery writer while breaking all the rules. | CrimeReads

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• “There is blood here and vigor, love and hate, irony and compassion”: a 1959 review of Philip Roth’s debut. | Book Marks
  

• “These attacks invalidate American stories, individually and in the collective.” Charles Yu on anti-Asian violence and dehumanization. | Los Angeles Times

• Nawal El Saadawi, Egyptian feminist writer, physician, and activist, has died
  at 89. | BBC

• “Poetry has been a good segue into thinking about voice and style in the way that I did with the novel.” Gabriela Garcia on Of Women and Salt and narrative themes. | Elle

• How Helen Frankenthaler’s art took her from high society to the downtown art scene of 1950s NYC, even when “becoming an artist was not necessarily in line with the family mythology.” | Lit Hub Biography

• “Imagining is a Black tradition. It is a queer tradition.” Shayla Lawz on speculative fiction and the revolutionary act of imagining. | Catapult 

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• Reading this year’s NBCC Award finalists: Stephanie Burt on Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America. | Lit Hub

• “Le Guin or Butler or Chandler are genre writers and transcendent writers. They are highly literary and proudly working in genre traditions.” Considering the jargon of the sci-fi and literary genres literary. | Countercraft

• Fear, loss, and the lessons of C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed in a year of pandemic. | Vox

• “I gave myself the simple assignment to look in the mirror and try to describe myself accurately and, to the best of my ability, without judgment.” Susan Stinson on finding the language for fatness. | Poets & Writers

Also on Lit Hub: What it’s like to operate on a 500-pound polar bear • Adrian Piper’s letter to editors • Read from Laura Lindstedt’s newly translated novel, My Friend Natalia (trans. David Hackston)