Lit Hub Daily: March 31, 2021

• “Recognizing that Elena Ferrante is most probably a man could also change things for the worse.” Elisa Sotgiu on reading gender and class in one of the great literary mysteries of our time. | Lit Hub

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• “To quote the only line of Gertrude Stein’s which I have ever been able to understand, ‘It is wonderful how I am not interested.’” You’ll need some aloe for these savage burns, from (and about) literary icons. | Lit Hub

• What can dogs (and jellyfish, and crows…) teach us about alien intelligence? A zoologist applies laws of the animal kingdom to the galaxy. | Lit Hub

• Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed, and Melissa Febos’s Girlhood all feature among the best reviewed books of the month. | Lit Hub, Book Marks

• March is looking up—and so are the book covers. Here are 19 beauties. | Lit Hub

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• “For all of what it may hide, narrative is a way of looking at the horror through a veil.” Amanda Dennis makes a case for the detective novel as the most thrilling of genres. | Lit Hub

• “Writing a novel in thirty days isn’t easy; writing a novel in prison during a global pandemic is even harder.” On year two of the partnership between NaNoWriMo and PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program. | Lit Hub

• Stranger than fiction: Shelly Ellis on the real cases of bigamy that inspired her thriller. | CrimeReads

• Whitney Otto recommends seven memoirs that ignore the limits of linearity in lieu of a more complex narrative. | Lit Hub Reading List

• Rebecca Onion reread Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, a book she once loved and… found it sorely lacking. | Slate

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• New books from Jeff VanderMeer, Martha Wells, Helen Oyeyemi, and more of April’s best reviewed Sci-Fi and Fantasy. | Book Marks

• “What would it mean to make caring for others into an explicitly public priority?” Reading Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through amid a national mental health crisis. | Public Books

• John Lewis’s posthumous graphic memoir, Run: Book One, is coming this summer. | The Washington Post

• UCLA’s Archive of Healing, “one of the most comprehensive databases of medicinal folklore in the world,” is now digitally accessible. | Hyperallergic

• “I didn’t understand any of that at all, and it’s fascinating how much it really worked as hearsay and gossip.” Jennifer Keishin Armstrong on the history of women in television and the impact of McCarthyism. | Bitch Media

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• “I love history, particularly the stories that get left out of overarching narratives because they are deemed too niche, strange, uncomfortable or hard to understand.” Kaitlyn Greenidge on her writing process. | Shelf Awareness

• “Besides buoyancy, the opposite of buoyancy drives my work a lot. It’s rage.” Sally Wen Mao dissects the relationship between language and power. | The Creative Independen

Also on Lit Hub: The prophetic visions and unflinching will of Harriet Tubman • Read a sonnet by Diane Seuss • Read from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s new novel, Libertie