Lit Hub Daily: November 20, 2019

• Ahead of tonight’s ceremony, we looked back at every National Book Award for Fiction and Nonfiction winner of the 21st century. | Book Marks
• “A closeness comes from an every-day giving of attention.” Nina McLaughlin on finding the natural world in Ovid. | Lit Hub
• What does the debutante ball look like in the global age of Instagram? | Lit Hub
• “Getting his guests drunk and listening to what they had to say in a state of intoxication was an old trick of Stalin’s.” Serhii Plohky on the dinner that changed WWII. | Lit Hub History
• How the Vietnam War changed political poetry: Daniel H. Weiss on Michael O’Donnell, Deer Hunter, and the arts that disillusioned soldiers turned to. | Lit Hub
• American diplomacy after Benghazi: on the risks taken by ambassadors abroad. | Lit Hub Politics
• On the evolution of Hollywood’s black musicals: a tale of obscurity, innovation, and, of course, The Wiz. | Lit Hub Film
• Documenting the lives of America’s have-nots: a conversation with no-nonsense journalist Malcolm Garcia. | Lit Hub Politics
• Read from National Book Award lifetime honoree Edmund White’s novel-in-progress. | Lit Hub
• Diplomatic tensions between Beijing and Stockholm flared again after the Swedish arm of PEN International honored Gui Minhai, a Chinese-born Swedish citizen and Beijing critic who disappeared in 2015. | The Telegraph
• “For anyone somewhat interested in cocktails it’s pretty worthless”: In the mixed drinks world, few books are as detested (and commercially successful) as Tequila Mockingbird, a book of recipes (written by an actor) that relies on literary puns. | Inside Hook
• The world’s largest secondhand book market is in Kolkata, India—and it’s under threat. | Atlas Obscura
• Sean Wilentz on historical memory and the “unfamiliar alternative history” of antislavery efforts in the US. | New York Review of Books
• “Can fiction be adequate to represent the lives of women while offering both solace and entertainment?” | Public Books
• “May we continue to gift writers with the time for wildness.” Sarah M. Broom on the power of unfinished work. | The Paris Review
• Ian Williams is the winner of this year’s $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his debut novel Reproduction. | CBC News

Also on Lit Hub: What myth retellings and persona poems teach us about ourselves • Jung Young Moon on the small mythologies of place • A story by Samuel R. Delaney, featured in the Boston Review.