Lit Hub Weekly: December 7 - 11, 2020

• “He believed he’d learn much more by traveling with Nunamiut hunters first, questioning them about wolf behavior in general.” Barry Lopez on the wildlife biologist who changed his life as an environmentalist. | Lit Hub Nature
• “I personally know the author of this story you’re reading.” Oh look, a new story by Rachel Kushner. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “In walking through dead writers’ houses, we understand that time and space do not coalesce.” Phoebe Hamilton-Jones on the particular thrill of literary tourism. | Lit Hub Travel
• We’ve been doing math to bring you the best reviewed books of 2020. | Book Marks
• Celebrating the best crime novels of a garbage year. | CrimeReads
• “Scholars have known about this correspondence since Hale donated Eliot’s letters to Princeton, in 1956, but for decades, the trove of documents remained a tantalizing secret—kept sealed, at Eliot’s insistence, until fifty years after both he and Hale had died.” On the secret history of T. S. Eliot’s muse, Emily Hale. | The New Yorker
• Ian Frazier on Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Steinberg, Route 66, and the feeling of rereading Lolita, “an American masterpiece of the atrocious-hilarious.” | The New Yorker
• Alison Lurie, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs, has died at the age of 94. | Washington Post
• “To truly channel him, I had to go at least partially French.” This James Baldwin-inspired meal will make you want to cancel your dinner plans. | The Paris Review
• “The way forward isn’t to pursue a dream of staying within our lanes. . . The only way forward is for those of us who are not among the one percent to make common cause in order to put an end to these inequities.” On the politics of cultural appropriation. | Dissent   
• “It isn’t to master an art that I have no desire to master, but, evidently, to create something out of my perplexity with the form.” Amit Chaudhuri on why he writes novels. | N+1
• Olga Tokarczuk’s translators talk about world literature, the influence of style on translation, and how they heard about Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “The bigger the big publishers get, the more risk-averse they become. The less willing they are to lose money. And then . . . the risk aversion becomes systemic.” Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson on publishing’s latest merger. | The Atlantic
• From Ursula K. Le Guin to Iain M. Banks to Kim Stanley Robinson, how science fiction has shaped socialism. | Tribune
• “I don’t think we realize how vital it is to step into unknown territory.” Rewa Zeinati on becoming an Arab Anglophone writer. | The Markaz Review
• Tattered Cover Bookstore just became the largest Black-owned bookstore in the US after being sold to two “Denver natives, high school rivals, and long-time friends.” | Publishers Weekly
• “It’s remarkable that she managed to publish as much work as she did, and of such high quality, given what else she was dealing with along the way.” Lucy Scholes on Tove Ditlevsen. | The Paris Review
• “Self-branding of this kind is less tragic narcissism and more a manifestation of uncertain labor markets . . . ‘a way to retain and assert personal agency and control within a general context of uncertainty and flux.’” On Caroline Calloway, the gig economy, self-publishing, and the publishing of one’s self. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• From Ray Bradbury to Victor LaValle, Alice Hoffman has some book recommendations for you. | ELLE
• A new book argues for self-help as “worthy of study in itself and also for what it reveals over time about readers’ habits, desires and values.” | The Times Literary Supplement

Also on Lit Hub:

Our favorite books of the year and our picks for the best literary adaptations of the year • Paul Hendrickson wonders what kinds of truth we need from our great poets • Samantha Ladwig on buying a bookstore at age 29 • Rebecca Worby on monoliths, cairns, hoodoos and other weird stuff people leave in the desert • Tina Turner talks about her spiritual practice and what she’s been reading during the pandemic • Lauren Martin: “the same way writers tackled the blank page was how I should tackle life” • Doreen St. Félix on June Jordan’s visions of Black future • On translating the little known 1970s Italian novel that anticipated the Anthropocene • Jessica Hagedorn on her “brainy, arty, fabulous” friend, Thulani Davis • On the undeniable appeal of a tiny, cold, beautiful island in the North Atlantic • On the dead male writers of Tinder, and what they mean for your romantic prospects • Shya Scanlon on Claudia Rankine’s masterful trilogy on whiteness in America • Nicole Brossard on the impossibility of saying everything • On being a Black American ex-pat looking for community in London • Wright Thompson on bourbon, books, and writing your way out of small-town America • Big Freedia on the song that started it all • Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard on the texture of language, poetics, and linguistic dispossession in translating Jean Daive • Chris Dennis on his struggling with drugs, and life in prison • Can you imagine KISS in the Instagram era? • “Every digital device is, fundamentally, a video game: in its intellectual construction, in its logic” • Thomas Mullen wrote a novel about a terrible pandemic—14 years later his family got COVID-19 • On memorializing history’s darkest corners with a little absurdity • We asked Andrzej Sapkowski—creator of The Witcher—about the mythology behind his global bestseller • Mark Hage documents the private lives of shuttered stores • Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham talk social media, Black futurity, and the archive • Mary Gaitskill on Agaat, a novel of Apartheid-era South Africa • On the German writer who found a home on a remote English island • Robin Lane Fox reads some of the earliest medical texts in existence

Best of Book Marks:

Barack Obama, Natasha Trethewey, Sylvia Plath, and The Beatles all feature among the Best Reviewed Memoirs and Biographies of 2020 • New titles by N. K. Jemisin, Stephen King, Susanna Clarke, and Karen Russell all feature among the Best Reviewed Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror of 2020 • New titles by Nicole Krauss, Stephen King, Emma Cline, and Zora Neale Hurston all feature among the Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2020 • New titles from Zadie Smith, Helen Macdonald, Claudia Rankine, and Samantha Irby all feature among the Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2020 • New titles from Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Jorie Graham, Margaret Atwood, and Robert Hass all feature among the Best Reviewed Poetry Collections of 2020 • The Opium Prince author Jasmine Aimaq recommends five books about the “real” Afghanistan • From the archives, on the day of his death: a classic review of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22

New on CrimeReads:

The surprisingly dark history of gingerbread, from Maya Corrigan • Paige Shelton with 10 cold thrillers to make it through the long winter nights • Kia Abdullah interrogates our fascination with group misdeeds • Olivia Rutigliano on 10 (more) films you forgot took place at Christmas • The most interesting author interview you will ever see is this video of John le Carré from 1965 • Molly Odintz welcomes a new wave of vigilantes fighting for the oppressed • Les Egerton: in praise of hopeful endings and against nihilism • Jane Cleland learns, late in life, to take a second look • Brad Meltzer and Keith Farrell unveil the secrets of America’s Stonehenge • Andy McCarthy on Goodfellas at 30