Lit Hub Weekly: December 6 - 10, 2021

• A feast for the eyes: Our favorite designers pick the 101 best book covers of 2021. | Lit Hub

  Article continues after advertisement

• “To write about it is to become a vicarious participant in the girl’s victimization and humiliation. I am doing it now, writing about it, and to what purpose?” Siri Hustvedt on the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens. | Lit Hub

• Megan Mayhew Bergman wonders if the “planet’s failing health calls for new belief systems and spiritual practices.” | Lit Hub Climate Change

• “Woolf understood that a dystopian future would not look like The Hunger Games or The Road so much as it would the everyday, banal world of Before, shot through now with the dead and their ghosts.” Colin Dickey rereads Mrs. Dalloway during an endless pandemic. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Book Marks rounds up the best reviewed books of 2021 in essay collections; short story collections; sci-fi, fantasy, and horror; and memoirs and biographies. | Book Marks

  Article continues after advertisement

• The best true crime books of 2021, featuring works from Elon Green, Audrey Clare Farley, Mikita Brottman, and more. | CrimeReads

• Listen to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2021 Nobel Prize lecture in literature. | The Nobel Prize

• Why an author’s social media following is not necessarily a predictor of great book sales. | The New York Times

• Who were Shakespeare’s female editors? | The Guardian

• “Blaming Sebold will not get us any closer to a world in which a story like this can’t be told.” Camonghne Felix on Anthony Broadwater, Alice Sebold, and the carceral justice system. | The Cut

  Article continues after advertisement

• Why are publishers so hesitant to credit translators? | Vulture

• “If professionalism means not talking about the ways our health care system is broken, who benefits?” Ruth Madievsky on the necessity of AIDS history to her work as an HIV pharmacist. | Harper’s Bazaar

• Lili Anolik, host of Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College, talks about dark academia and the lasting appeal of Donna Tart. | Bustle

• Why law enforcement shouldn’t be in libraries. | Book Riot

• “Poetry gives us language for what is both widely shared and highly individual.” Lindsay Turner on turning to poetry in the wake of miscarriage. | The Atlantic

  Article continues after advertisement

• Maurice Carlos Ruffin left his job as a corporate lawyer to pursue writing, and has no regrets. | Oldster

• Maddie Crum considers Generations, Lucille Clifton’s only work of nonfiction: “an assertive book, a lyric autoethnography.” | Los Angeles Review of Books

• “Poetry out of testimony.” Vivian Gornick on the power and popularity of personal narrative. | The Yale Review

• Amanda Gorman breaks down her writing habits. | Bustle

• On the life and literary career of Harriet the Spy creator Louise Fitzhugh. | The New Yorker

  Article continues after advertisement

• “The techniques I use to find out things for my books are the same techniques I learned as an investigative reporter.” Robert Caro speaks about how journalism informs his book writing.  | The New Republic

Also on Lit Hub:

Counting down the Biggest Literary Stories of the Year, 50 to 31 • On the complicated task of capturing John Milton’s dual sides • Sonia Manzano on finding her way to Sesame Street • What happens when you start an indie press with your life partner? • On the Gustave Flaubert odd couple novel-that-wasn’t • Drawing the life of Leonard Cohen • On the hidden agency of women in medieval stories • A brief history of cheesy pasta • Cornel West on revolutionary intellectual Frantz Fanon • On the myth of foundational nationalism • Vivian Maier’s earliest New York photographs • Six historians speak to the terrain of African literature • On Captain Cook’s ill-fated arrival in Hawaii • How (and why) America criminalizes poverty • John-Paul Stonard on the “image-making instinct” of early humans • Obed Silva learns the meaning of the word “güey” • Tabitha Lasley revisits Deepwater Horizon and Piper Alpha • Mira Ptacin on the surreality of motherhood • On opera’s rules of gravity • The necessary energy of eruptive protest • How the Mosul Book Forum became a hub of expression • Polly Crosby on the hidden past of her childhood village • Puncturing the toxic dream of the ballerina • Jennifer Clements on the adaptation of her novel, Prayers for the Stolen • David Kirby on writing the unknowable • On the legacy of 30 Rock