Lit Hub Daily: November 10, 2021

• “A book that is nonlinear may not be a string of pearls but it might be the facets of a diamond or the bones in a skeleton.” Rebecca Solnit recommends the meandering nonfiction narrative. | Lit Hub Craft

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• “I suppose it looks inevitable that, during these early months when I watched Philip Roth at work, I too discovered the urge to write.” Alexandra Marshall on finding friendship in the wake of tragedy. | Lit Hub

• Read excerpts from featured authors at the Festival Neue Literatur, which spotlights the best of contemporary German writing. | Lit Hub

• Tangled anatomy: a physician muses on bodily decline and end-of-life care through the flawed design of the throat. | Lit Hub Science

• “It will outrage as many readers as it delights.” On its 60th anniversary, read the first reviews of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• What does it mean to find solace in the face of suffering? Michael Ignatieff considers the war-time poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Primo Levi. | Lit Hub

• Stan Cox lays out what we’ve learned from three decades of failed global climate negotiations. | Lit Hub Climate Change

• “Mankind has probably been given its last chance.” On Albert Camus’s legendary postwar speech at Columbia. | Lit Hub History

• How Sir Thomas Bodley transformed Oxford’s library from a dilapidated husk to the finest institutional library in Europe. | Lit Hub Libraries

• The Liar’s Dictionary author Eley Williams on classic ghost stories and Goodnight Moon as avant-garde horror. | Book Marks

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• Melanie Golding on the story of the selkie and the power of folklore. | CrimeReads

• “The language of objectification has followed Ratajkowski like a hungry dog for her whole career, waiting for her to let down her guard.” Andrea Long Chu profiles Emily Ratajkowski. | The New York Times Magazine

• Kate Dwyer considers the Hollywood book boom. | Marie Claire

• “I want to evoke joy, and nostalgia, and home.” Magdalene Abraha on Black storytelling and creating community. | Bustle

• Uli Beutter Cohen shares what she learned from asking hundreds of New Yorkers what they liked to read. | CNBC

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• Dawnie Walton unpacks the importance and legacy of Santigold. | NPR

• Alice Wong talks about how the personal and the political are interdependent for her. | Kirkus

• Can Powell’s reinvent itself after the pandemic? | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: How Thoreau launched the Transcendentalist experiment in education • Tom Roston considers the ongoing popularity of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five • Read from Alison Macleod’s latest novel, Tenderness