Lit Hub Daily: September 15, 2021

• “The literature of the voice is dying. The literature of the pose has arrived. The basis of literary style has shifted.” Stephen Marche on Sally Rooney and contemporary fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• T.C. Boyle recommends working through writer’s block with a few (metaphorical) bags of prunes. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

• Vince Passaro recommends books that grapple with New York City as “literary character, literary machine, psychological event.” | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “Eliot had come to believe that the depiction of ‘things that never existed’—the writing of novels—might itself be a way of making the world better.” Rebecca Mead on Middlemarch. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Idle chatter: Maria Tatar on why we should all be gossips. | Lit Hub

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• Andrea Abi-Karam considers the importance of radical ekphrasis, a way of speaking to the dead through artmaking. | Lit Hub

• Vesper Flights, Money, The Wind in the Willows, and more rapid-fire book recs from Leif Enger. | Book Marks

• Katie Lattari with five books in which paintings reveal surprising emotional truths. | CrimeReads

• A reading list in honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month. | CLMP

• Hannah Giorgis on the untold stories of iconic Black TV shows. | The Atlantic

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• “I have a sense of normal being, you know, vast—vast and all inclusive.” Helen Shaw profiles Ruth Ozeki. | Vulture

• Maddie Crum considers Simone de Beauvoir’s Inseparable, and the perils of posthumous publication. | The Baffler

• Ryan M. Moser, a poet incarcerated in Florida, addresses depression in correctional facilities, “a real but unspoken problem.” | Mental Hellth

• Chelsea T. Hicks pays tribute to N. Scott Momaday, who “offers readers a beguiling mixture of sacredness and irreverence.” | The Paris Review

• “Yearning for connection is an undercurrent throughout Groff’s work.” Reading Lauren Groff’s new novel, Matrix. | Chicago Review of Books

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Also on Lit Hub: Cai Emmons on her ALS diagnosis and writing as a reflection of health • A poem by Devon Walker-Figueroa • Read from Gayl Jones’ latest novel, Palmares