Lit Hub Daily: November 9, 2021

TODAY: In 1934, Carl Sagan is born.

• “Loving a book is a lot like loving a person.” Read Lily King’s ode to a Great Literary Love, Shirley Hazzard’s The Evening of the Holiday. | Lit Hub

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• Does the future of writing involve AI? Drew Zeiba considers the growing potential of computational literature. | Lit Hub Tech

• A playlist, a pandemic friendship, and a series of comics: How Sejal Shah and Shebani Rao collaborated to create a hybrid medium. | Lit Hub

• Bob Spitz recounts a meeting of legends: Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. | Lit Hub Music

• “Humanitarian crises are never pretty, and 376 was no exception.” Dan Jones on how climate and refugee crises led to the collapse of Rome. | Lit Hub History

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• Chibundu Onuzo searches for representations of middle-aged women, in all their “naïve, shrewd, unlikeable, sympathetic” glory. | Lit Hub

• “Erase all overdue fines. Feel lighter.” How to reopen a high school library… 18 months after Covid lockdown. | Lit Hub Libraries

• Leah Carroll on drug smugglers, Miami outlaws, and the mad quest to sell “Hemingway’s Picasso.” | CrimeReads

• This month’s 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers features Mina Seçkin, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., Alison MacLeod, Robin McLean, and Padgett Powell. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

• “Wildly original, brilliantly comic, brutally gruesome.” On Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. | Book Marks

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• Nick Mamatas with novels that start out as noir, then take a sharp left turn. | CrimeReads

• Mary Gaitskill discusses the unsettling power of Lolita, her appreciation of John Cheever, and her new book. | The Guardian

• Lilly Dancyger makes the case for memoir as detective novel. | Writer’s Digest

• Listen to this interview with Tiphanie Yanique and Dawnie Walton. | NPR

• “There are a million ways in which one is the recipient of privilege that one has done nothing to earn.” Frank Bidart unpacks the sociocultural circumstances that inspired his latest collection. | The Millions

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• “We can’t forget these realities and how they have been shaped by colonial pasts.” Amitav Ghosh talks about the climate crisis and his recent book. | LARB

• Conservative parents in a number of districts are pushing to remove books with anti-racist and/or LGBTQ themes from school libraries. | Los Angeles Times

• “Borders are there to separate.” Leonora Simonovis on poetry, translation, and the impact of borders. | The Rumpus

Also on Lit Hub: 19 new books to get at your local indie this week • How work stress affects your body • Read from Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence

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