Lit Hub Weekly: December 13 - 17, 2021

• “Write long, enflamed emails about necessity of cutting car chase. Enumerate other, cheaper scenes that could replace car chase.” Tom Bissell’s guide for how to write (almost) anything. | Lit Hub Humor

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• “Now there’s a genre I haven’t wrecked yet…” Mel Brooks goes behind scenes of his iconic Star Wars sendup, Spaceballs. | Lit Hub Film

• “I savored the title. The Spanish surname. The promise that these girls would share the secret of how they undid a part of themselves.” Elizabeth Acevedo on Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. | Lit Hub Criticism

• A girl named Silence, a sword-wielding princess-pirate, and more medieval tales that should immediately be made into movies. | Lit Hub Film

• Sally Rooney, Kazuo Ishiguro, Colson Whitehead, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jonathan Franzen, and Lauren Groff all feature among the Best Reviewed Fiction of 2021. | Book Marks

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• Crime and the City heads to Los Angeles for its centenary edition. | CrimeReads

• “Revolution starts within each of us—in the demands we take up against the world, in the daily fight against nihilism.” Hua Hsu on the revolutionary writing of bell hooks. | The New Yorker

• A New York state ethics panel has determined that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo must return millions of dollars in book earnings. | CBS News

• Read the last interview of Anne Rice. | The New York Times

• “Writing after many years becomes a place you can hide. Because you acquire a certain amount of craft, it allows you to do something while not revealing yourself.” Anne Carson on myth, drawing, and gratitude. | Interview

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• A look at the 50 best books of literary journalism of the 21st century. | GQ

• On the politics of Johnny Cash. | The New Republic

• “We were all kind of deranged in 2020. The fiction coming out of that year will probably be a little deranged, too.” Emily St. John Mandel on writing a pandemic, and writing in a pandemic. | Esquire

• The publishing world is finally embracing Black cookbooks. | Eater

• This is what it’s like to have your book banned by the local school board. | Slate

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• Ingrid Rojas Conteras talks to Naima Coster, Alexandra Kleeman, R. O. Kwon, Laura van den Berg, and Bryan Washington about their preferred metaphors for novel writing. | Catapult

• “If I fall in love with a book, I never worry about sending it out.” Douglas Stuart on finding success with Shuggie Bain. | Publishers Weekly

• Peter Matthews looks at the US government-approved “Useful Fiction” genre, AKA the “military-mediocre lit complex.” | Dirt 

• How Stephen Sondheim made space for queer and trans people. | Bitch Media

• On the best translated books of the year. | Words Without Borders

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• “In the writing, I tried to avoid the mistake, which can be easy in a memoir, of presenting myself as an angelic person.” Bernardine Evaristo and Jami Attenberg discuss their new books and their experiences as writers. | EW

Also on Lit Hub:

Our 48 favorite books of the year • Lee Gutkind on how creative nonfiction became a serious genre • An incomplete list of the great literary minds we lost in 2021 • The new Station Eleven adaptation isn’t really a pandemic story • How to experience creative awe like the Brontës • On the 1930 sound film that gave Greta Garbo a voice • Bonnie Friedman on taking clues from your manuscript • On the end times sketches of New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren • Aysegül Savas on moving beyond the business of writing • Visiting an icon of natural winemaking in Slovenia • Rereading Rachel Carson’s sea trilogy in a time of climate crisis • Hasanthika Sirisena on “dark tourism” • Mike Gonzalez remembers Greg Tate • The best books of 2021 you may have missed • Why the lack of closure doesn’t have to be devastating •  Should “Christian fiction” join the mainstream? • On the oft-overlooked Greek writer Andreas Karkavitsas • On the radical legacy of Curtis Mayfield • Does climate fiction make a difference? • What the Stoics can teach us about death • The history of Rüstem’s Bookshop, Cyprus’s historic bookstore-café • Confronting fascism in Chile’s presidential election • Rabih Alameddine’s year in reading poetry • Why Xenophon’s Anabasis still appeals to readers after centuries • On Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza • Tiphanie Yanique on breaking the rules of form, starting with the Hero’s Journey