Lit Hub Daily: November 25, 2020
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1845, Portuguese writer José Maria de Eça de Queirós, whom Zola considered to be “far greater than Flaubert,” is born.
- “The summer of 2020, I spent countless hours helping irate customers cancel their orders of popular anti-racism books.” Katherine Morgan on selling books to white “allies.” | Lit Hub
- With winter at the doorstep, find a little warmth in the best book covers of November. | Lit Hub
- “There has been a 30- to 40-year war against human political imagination.” A conversation between the late David Graeber and Maja Kantar. | Lit Hub Politics
- The best reviewed books of the month in science, tech, and nature, and memoir and biography. | Lit Hub, Book Marks
- “Finish reading an especially difficult book, and its cover functions more like a trophy awarded for intellectual labor.” Legendary designer Peter Mendelsund on what a book cover can do. | Lit Hub Design
- “The kids’ resiliency may have more to do with ignorance than youth; they have no idea what they’ve just survived.” Momentary joy in a refugee camp manifests in a game of soccer. | Lit Hub Politics
- “At bottom, and for all their education, erudition, and reputation as men committed to liberty, they lacked the moral vision to grow beyond their now dated prewar principles.” On the failures of Reconstruction (lest we repeat them). | Lit Hub History
- Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Martin Amis’s Money, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, and more rapid-fire book recs from Ryan Chapman. | Book Marks
- Looking for literary inspirations to social distance outside in style? Dwyer Murphy rounds up the twenty greatest fall jackets in crime fiction. | Crime Reads
- Alison Stine: “From one of the very first shots, I knew the Appalachia of this film was not going to be the Appalachia that I, my family, or my friends know.” At least this Thanksgiving we can all share in dunking on Hillbilly Elegy. | Salon
- “As a Black person in America, when something happens you are taken back to past stories. We can see these connections.” Read Ijeoma Oluo and Emmanuel Acho in conversation. | Los Angeles Times
- After thousands of writers signed a letter in protest of Audible’s exchange policy, the company said it would change. | The Bookseller
- Hear from the teen authors working with a DC-based literacy program to publish books on racial justice, policing, and more. | WAMU
- How does GPT-3, “the latest incarnation of artificially intelligent natural-language systems,” write when it writes about love? | The New York Times
- “I have a natural investment in the landscape through my ancestry. It’s something that I think about quite often and have for a long time. So I finally put it down in this book.” Read an interview with N. Scott Momaday. | CS Monitor
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