Lit Hub Daily: November 4, 2021

TODAY: In 1896, British author and editor J. R. Ackerley, pictured here with his beloved dog Queenie, is born.

• Rax King on learning sexuality from Samantha Jones, who “vamped and innuendo’d across the screen” in Sex and the City. | Lit Hub TV

• A three-dimensional syllabus: Kim Beil on lessons learned while cataloguing an entire library of 19th-century schoolbooks. | Lit Hub

• Reading the letters of American abstract expressionist Alice Trumbull Mason, whose trove of correspondence builds “a playful, as well as melancholic, portrait of the artist.” | Lit Hub Art

• “And just how did you manage to survive?” Justine Picardie recounts a fraught homecoming: when Catherine Dior and other survivors returned from Ravensbrück. | Lit Hub History

• Amy Butcher recommends defiant books by defiant women. | Lit Hub

• “Really the problem is that deep, deep river that’s flowing beneath all the troubles, that subterranean channel that is your parents.” Cheryl Strayed talks to Debbie Millman about grit, healing, and the writing life. | Lit Hub

• “Such soggy inspirational literature makes me seasick.” Five book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks

• “The first lesson I took from Agatha was retreat.” Lori Rader-Day on life lessons learned from Dame Christie. | CrimeReads

• “In my opinion, people’s stories cannot be dissociated from their understanding of the past.” Ai Weiwei discusses his new memoir, the true cost of freedom, and the meaning of home. | Harper’s Bazaar

• A look at how bookstores are handling supply-chain problems this holiday season. | The A.V. Club

• “Hers is an embodied poetics, direct, immediate and alive: her voice resonates across time and space.” Francesca Wade on Diane di Prima. | The Baffler

• Rebecca Donner unpacks the research and revision process behind her latest nonfiction book. | Guernica

• Did Covid change the way we dream? | The New York Times Magazine

• “I’m taking more time to exist and not rushing into articulation.” Janice Lee on writing across genres. | Catapult

• A critical edition of T.S. Eliot’s prose will “continue to raise the right questions to ask of its curious author,” writes Gregory McNamee. | LARB

Also on Lit Hub: On the explosive rise of literacy in Tudor England • Anjanette Delgado’s definition of “home” • Read from Tiphanie Yanique’s latest novel, Monster in the Middle

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