Lit Hub Daily: September 14, 2021

• “It was only months before that I was devouring Walter Farley and writing love letters to a horse. (I will have you…I will!)” In which Joy Williams responds to our questions via typewriter. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

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• Colson Whitehead talks crime fiction, midcentury modern furniture, and why a heist novel was the best way to tell the story of New York. | Lit Hub

• George Makari considers the phobic world of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which “asks the reader to identify either with a brutal killer or with an evil social order.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• Is Pinocchio really about lying, or why we should all go to school? | Lit Hub

• This month’s 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers features Ben Apatoff, Callie Garnett, Lee Matthew Goldberg, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and José Vadi. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

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• “Headless walruses were washing ashore and they were trying to figure out, were the heads removed before or after they went in the water?” Mary Roach on finding the weird and wild in science stories. | Lit Hub Nature

• Amanda Jayatissa celebrates the slow-burn suspense of South-East Asian thrillers. | CrimeReads

• “Nouveau roman meets Manhattan geography, under sci-fi moonlight.” John Updike on Cosmopolis and Don DeLillo’s post-Christian search for order. | Book Marks

• Ottessa Moshfegh recounts a chance encounter with an unforgettable artist on the eve of 9/11. | GQ

• In praise of using a physical dictionary, which “feels like prying open an oyster rather than falling down a rabbit hole.” | New York Times Magazine

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• Janice Lee on her new novel, the apocalypse, and intentional composition. | The Rumpus

• How two recent novels challenge horror’s Final Girl trope. | Slate

• “Writing fake letters to advice columns could not be considered a good career move.” On the consequences of practicing an underappreciated art. | Gawker

• Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff are asking Amazon to prevent its algorithms from promoting books that misinform the public on COVID-19. | The Guardian

• Tia Williams lists the books she read while writing her latest novel, including those by Stephen King, Melissa Febos, and others. | New York Magazine

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Also on Lit Hub: Why an early feminist advocated for the right to divorce • From Gilgamesh to climate science, Giulio Boccaletti recommends stories of water • Read from Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, Harlem Shuffle