Lit Hub Daily: October 5, 2021

TODAY: In 1900, Bing Xin, who wrote for young readers and was one of the most prolific Chinese writers of the 20th century, is born.   

• Clocking in, chanting, and selling out subjects: Sara Davidson on the ten writing lessons she learned from hanging out with Joan Didion. | Lit Hub Craft

• “My stories are my way of saying, I saw what you did. It registered in my body. It came out as a swarm of words.” Jocelyn Nicole Johnson on the uses of “vengeful fiction.” | Lit Hub Craft

• Toews! Sedaris! Franzen! New Books Tuesday is stacked. | The Hub

• Can fiction fight fake news? Amitava Kumar considers how it might. | Lit Hub

• Emma Dries muses on how the latest trend in climate fiction—fragmentation—is “yet another attempt to wrest some control over a hyperobject” of our own creation. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Myriam J.A. Chancy talks to Jane Ciabattari about writing Haiti. | Lit Hub

• “We need ‘firsts’ to do more than break the barriers to get into the system; we need them to break the system itself.” Derecka Purnell on racial injustice and the false promise of police reforms. | Lit Hub Politics

• Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen on cultural estrangement, grief, and recording her family’s Farose stories. | Lit Hub

• A queer fantasy romance, a monstrous baby, a destination wedding to the eternal home of a dead bride, and more await you in October’s most-anticipated SFF titles. | Book Marks

• John Copenhaver asks, how can we build empathy for unlikable characters without filing down their rough edges? | CrimeReads

• How has the pandemic changed what we normally think of as “science writing”? Ed Yong offers some reflections. | The Atlantic

• Kyle Chayka reviews Mark McGurl’s new book on the ways Amazon and algorithmic approaches to literature have changed fiction. | The New Republic

• Read a breakdown of the effect of supply-chain snarls on the publishing industry (and get your holiday book pre-orders in now). | The New York Times

• How Indigenous folklore helped geoscientists understand the story of three giant, out-of-place boulders off the coast of the Makin Islands. | Hakai Magazine

• Paul Auster discusses his new book and why the greatest writers are monomaniacs. | The Guardian

• Michelle Zauner on claiming her Korean identity. | NPR Code Switch

• Christine Pride and Jo Piazza talk about co-writing a dual-narrator novel. | EW

Also on Lit Hub: Curtis Bunn on America’s repeated history of racism and police brutality • A poem by Marcio Junqueira, trans. by Johnny Lorenz • Read from Miriam Toews’ latest novel, Fight Night 

---