Lit Hub Daily: March 23, 2022

• “I’ve exhausted the bullshit of expectation, and I’m no longer trying to please.” Sara Lippmann’s manifesto for sounding like yourself. | Lit Hub Craft

  Article continues after advertisement

• OSCARS WEEK: In part three of our literary look at this year’s Best Picture Nominees, we recommend what to read (and watch) if you liked The Power of the Dog and Nightmare Alley. | Lit Hub Film

• Alexa Schmitt-Bugler considers the allure of grimdark fantasy, a genre (and feeling) that “clearly isn’t much concerned with sunlit castles and true-hearted knights.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• Helen Humphreys reflects on the “slippage” between her world and Sylvia Plath’s. | Lit Hub

• Twenty years after Secretary: How would Mary Gaitskill’s short story about workplace sexual abuse—originally adapted as “a kinky rom-com with a happy ending”—be made today? | Lit Hub Film

  Article continues after advertisement

• “Sometimes, fitting a masterpiece into a novel can feel like trying to get a mattress into hatchback.” Joe Mungo Reed on the challenges of placing real art in fiction. | Lit Hub Craft

• Michael Lewis, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Tommy Orange, and more rapid-fire book recs from Elissa Washuta. | Book Marks

• Sara A. Mueller on the most successful madam in US history. | CrimeReads

• Charley Locke recommends the practice of keeping a commonplace book, “filled with quotes, lines from books and songs and poems and conversations that stuck with me.” | The New York Times

• “If a book is challenged, it probably means that it’s saying something honest and vulnerable and true.” Maia Kobabe reflects on authoring a memoir that’s been banned from some schools. | Slate

  Article continues after advertisement

• Justin E. H. Smith on the internet and why social media is only “a simulation of discussion and debate.” | Los Angeles Review of Books

• “I live in the hope that, for all of my writing about us, I remain a friend, and not the stranger you should never have trusted.” Pico Iyer reflects on decades of letters to a man he met, once, in Myanmar. | Guernica

• Dionne Brand, Simone Browne, Lauren Michele Jackson, Claire Schwartz, and Adania Shibli revisit Toni Morrison’s only published short story, “Recitatif.” | Jewish Currents

• “Time is not a river. It’s a lake.” Samantha Hunt on alcohol and the hauntings of family history. | The New Yorker

• Why don’t we acknowledge the danger that public librarians face? | Electric Literature

  Article continues after advertisement

Also on Lit Hub: John Markoff on the Merry Pranksters’ Trips Festival, a supersize acid test • A poem by Maja Haderlap, translated by Tess Lewis • Read from Alejandro Varela’s debut novel, The Town of Babylon