Lit Hub Weekly: January 2-5, 2024

• Whatever else it may hold, 2024 is going to be a great year for books. Here are 230 we’re particularly excited about, plus 24 sci-fi and fantasy titles to watch out for and the poetry books we want to read in the new year. | Lit Hub
• Leona Godin on the enduring trope of the blind pencil vendor, and navigating an obsession with photography while being blind. | Lit Hub
• Marlon James on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, authenticity as pose, and not reading his book reviews. | Lit Hub
• “Bookselling is a polar, problematic lover, an insistent poly-amant.” What booksellers can teach us about reading, writing, and publishing. | Lit Hub
• “Can secondary memory, stories passed down through time, unreliable, malleable—can these stories be considered research?” Vanessa Chan makes the case for throwing out the historical fiction rulebook. | Esquire
• Jennifer Szalai considers the lessons of recent books about disinformation in the age of mistrust. | The New York Times
• Whatever else it may hold,2024 is going to be a great year for books. Here are 230 we’re particularly excited about, plus 24 sci-fi and fantasy titles to watch out for and the poetry books we’re excited to read in the new year. | Lit Hub
• Leona Godin on the enduring trope of the blind pencil vendor, and navigating an obsession with photography while being blind. | Lit Hub
• Marlon James on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, authenticity as pose, and not reading his book reviews. | Lit Hub
• “This is how we live now. What do we have to say about it?” Kate Brody on writing about the Internet as we know it. | Lit Hub
• “The almanacs of the American Civil War capture a particular moment of instability within the national consciousness.” Jill Spivey Caddell considers the lessons of Civil War era almanacs. | JSTOR Daily
• A judge has ruled that the man charged with stabbing Salman Rushdie is entitled to see a manuscript of the author’s memoir as part of trial preparation. | The Guardian
• “Spokesman for a generation, perhaps, but one that had fallen out of fashion.” Adam Langer considers Philip Roth as persona. | The Atlantic
• Adrienne Raphel dives into the archives of The Paris Metro, “a full high-low smorgasbord, from in-depth interviews with city employees to poetry… and capsule reviews of Paris’s worst restaurants to coverage of pickup softball leagues.” | The Paris Review
• “What Refaat asked of every one of us was to tell his tale. And his tale and those of others need to change this world, need to stop the genocide. It is not fiction. It is not poetry. It is his life.” Mosab Abu Toha remembers Refaat Alareer. | LARB
• Joshua Barone explores the unlikely friendship between Willa Cather and Yehudi Menuhin. | The New York Times
• “Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes…” An ode to one of the greatest fictional spies of all time, John Le Carré’s George Smiley. | The Conversation
• Happy new year. Jonathan Franzen still hates cats. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub:

In praise of reading: how literature enables us to inhabit new worlds Why there’s always time to follow your bookish dreams • 12 tips for appearing writerly in front of the camera • Francesca Peacock on just how deep a biographer will go • Kyle Dillon Hertzon the power of facing trauma in writing • Emily Schultz on the importance of slanted truths in storytelling • Kate Brody on writing about the Internet as we know it • What happens when a fire destroys all your paintings? You become a writer, of course • Erika Howsare on finding inspiration from the day’s headlines • On the serious business of 19th-century fairy paintings