Lit Hub Daily: November 30, 2021

• “You just have the time you have.” Seven writers talk about balancing their creative lives with their day jobs, from bartending to construction. | Lit Hub

  Article continues after advertisement

• Art imitating life (and death): On the Italian electrical scientist who (may have) inspired Dr. Frankenstein. | Lit Hub History

• 44 writers share their favorite books to give as presents in the Book Marks Holiday Gift Guide. | Book Marks

• “The case can be made that Tommie Smith and John Carlos started the Black Lives Matter movement 42 years before anyone actually heard the term.” On the lasting impact of Smith and Carlos’ protest at the 1968 Olympics. | Lit Hub

• Kaya Oakes ruminates on the gendering of anger through the lens of notoriously livid activist Dorothy Day. | Lit Hub Politics

  Article continues after advertisement

• “A piece of careless hackwork.” Read the 1885 reviews of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. | Book Marks

• Nick Tosches on the underappreciated genius of William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, the source material for the new film. | CrimeReads

• “God, after all, may have sent the Flood to revise his work, but he too saved the best bits of his first draft in the Ark.” Peter Ho Davies considers the saving of darlings. | Bookforum

• On the life and legacy of Stephen Sondheim. | Vulture 

• “More speech, however exhausting, is required, if not necessarily desired, by everyone.” Lorrie Moore on marriage and the weight of expectations. | NYRB

  Article continues after advertisement

• Long before Henry David Thoreau, formerly enslaved Black people made Walden Woods a home. | The Washington Post

• “I will keep coming back to Louise Meriwether’s masterpiece of a novel because in it, she shows us that we do matter.” Deesha Philyaw revisits Daddy Was a Number Runner. | The Paris Review

• It turns out that the strangeness of Duolingo’s sentences helps your brain learn. | Slate

• Recommended reading: three great banned Saudi novels. | The Markaz Review

Also on Lit Hub: The 11 best book covers of November • James Hannaham on creating the stories you want to create • Read from Robin Mclean’s debut novel, Pity the Beast