Lit Hub Daily: March 9, 2021

• Proceed if you dare: here are 50 terrible, horrible, no good, very bad book covers of classics, inflicted upon us by the public domain. | Lit Hub
• “Rivers make good metaphors—too good, perhaps.” Elizabeth Kolbert cruises down the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and considers our climate predicament. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• Sophie Wilson on Virginia Woolf’s “frock consciousness,” and the genderless fashion looks inspired by Orlando. | Lit Hub
• Living with the ghost of a Sex Pistol: Donna Florio on having Sid Vicious as a neighbor, and the acolytes who still visit today. | Lit Hub
• “For Weil, attention is a ‘negative effort,’ one that requires that we stand still rather than lean in.” Three cheers for Simone Weil’s radical conception of attention. | Lit Hub Biography
• Theodore Dalrymple recommends books about doctors and patients, featuring Mikhail Bulgakov, Dorothy Parker, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Michelle Nijhuis on the cooperative efforts to preserve public lands, and the white nationalists who “seem to believe that their survival depends instead on ruining everything for the rest of us.” | Lit Hub Nature
• Thirty books in thirty years: Donna Leon talks inspiration, craft, and her long-running Inspector Brunetti series. | CrimeReads
• New books by Kazuo Ishiguro, Samuel R. Delany, and Kevin Brockmeier all feature among March’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy. | Book Marks
• “I remembered how this mall had felt like a world with its own possibilities and laws.” Laura Van Den Berg on the strangeness of taking her mother to get vaccinated at the mall of her youth. | Harper’s Bazaar
• Maria Aurora Couto reflects on her years-long friendship with Graham Greene. | Scroll
• Reading this year’s NBCC Award finalists: Carlin Romano on Tom Zoellner’s Island on Fire. | Lit Hub
• A brief history of Choose Your Own Adventures, “one of the most extraordinary successes in the history of publishing.” | 50 Years of Text Games
• “Saunders’s adoration of short stories cannot be chalked up to their mere manageability.” On short stories and the literary career of George Saunders. | The Baffler
• This month’s 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers features Jakob Guanzon, Christine Smallwood, Dawnie Walton, Megan Nolan, and Lucy Ives. | Lit Hub
• An international group of writers, translators, and others is coordinating an effort to smuggle banned books into Iran. | Los Angeles Times
• Butler’s great subject was intimate power, of the kind that transforms relationships into fulcrums of collective destiny.” Examining the novels and narrative themes of Octavia Butler. | The New Yorker
• Three years ago, Sophie Baggott began a project to “read writing by a woman from every country in the world.” Here’s what she learned. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: 22 new books for your TBR pile! • Read from Hala Alyan’s latest novel, The Arsonists’ City • Read from Imbolo Mbue’s latest novel, How Beautiful We Were