Lit Hub Weekly: January 18 - 21, 2022

• Voyaging among the stars, while living through lockdown: Susan DeFreitas on her year of reading every Ursula K. Le Guin novel. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• On the necessity of recovery, in fitness and in writing. | Lit Hub Health

• “A writer has to develop a hide like a rhino.” 20 famous writers on being rejected (literarily, that is). | Lit Hub

• A.E. Rooks investigates the complicated history of the Black Joke, the ship that battled the slave trade. | Lit Hub History

• Brian Cox’s Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto, and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• Speculative thrillers and sci-fi to get through 2022. | CrimeReads

• “Her genius was at exploring the paradoxes and contradictions in the stories we tell ourselves.” Darryl Pinckney on Joan Didion, “our lady of deadpan.”  | NYRB

• In the new issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Vivian Gornick considers the myths and movement of New York City. | Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

• “She is inextricable from my sense of becoming not just an artist, but a queer artist, a queer woman.” Melissa Febos on Jeanette Winterson and queer influences. | NYRB

• Rivka Galchen explores the history of the anti-vax movement. | London Review of Books

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• Tara Isabella Burton revisits The Secret History, “a meticulously constructed, often exquisitely written novel that is suffused with such bleak nihilism that it borders on the diabolical.” | Gawker

• Lucy Sante discusses her transition, and changes both superficial and metaphysical. | Vanity Fair

• Playwrights and mandoo: Hanya Yanagihara’s dream dinner party. | Bon Appetit

• A new exhibition explores the role of maps in classic works of literature. | The Guardian

• “The show is obsessed with adaptation, the way that people (many of them actors) reuse and project upon a source.” Katy Waldman explores the post-apocalyptic art of Station Eleven. | The New Yorker

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• “Taking words at face value is what good rappers almost militantly don’t do.” Daniel Levin Becker on the rhyme and rhetoric of rap. | The Paris Review

• The story of Phinney Books, a neighborhood bookstore in Seattle with a unique book subscription program. | The Seattle Times

• Remembering Ali Mitgutsch, who “delighted readers with vast, detailed, cartoonish tableaus.” | The New York Times

• “This is what got us through the COVID lockdown, my father in New York and me in Los Angeles, talking books over the telephone.” David Ulin on reading with his father. | Oldster

• Juana Adcock on translation and the language of capitalism. | Poets & Writers

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• Read a profile of poet, novelist, and Björk collaborator Sjón. | The New York Times Magazine

Also on Lit Hub:

Kingsley Amis’s instructions for coping with hangovers • Zora Nealon Hurston on what white publishers won’t print • Bernardine Evaristo on the richness of older women’s stories • Twelve writers on the stories behind their author photos •  Anri Wheeler on watching My Neighbor Totoro on the eve of her daughters’ Omicron-surge return to school • Meet the man who quietly built a massive archive of artists’ deaths • On the genesis of Alain Locke’s “New Negro aesthetic” • The blurry boundaries of sibling intimacy • How humans learned to count • David Sanchez on reluctantly turning to autofiction • When James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry became friends • Janice P. Nimura on what draws biographers to certain lives • On the love and legacy of Elaine Goodale and Charles Eastman’s 1891 interracial marriage • John Della Volpe on the monumental burden of Gen Z • Lea Ypi on growing up in Communist Albania • Why teaching literature means teaching empathy • Aanchal Saraf on the queer feelings of  Sort Of • Mads Nygaard on finding his book’s American family • Mira Ptacin on art-making and domestic labor in Bergman’s Island