Lit Hub Weekly: January 24 - 28, 2022

• Morgan Thomas against “place as character”—and in favor of something more dynamic. | Lit Hub Craft
• “It was a power ballad missile of queasy erotic awakening aimed straight at my 14-year-old heart.” Summer Brennan revisits the genius of Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).” | Lit Hub Music
• “It was like an über-nerdy On the Road.” Oliver Roeder tracks the highs and lows of competitive Scrabble. | Lit Hub Sports?
• How “drunkard” narratives by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman fueled the early temperance movement. | Lit Hub History
• Zadie Smith on the genius of Toni Morrison’s only short story. | The New Yorker
• “The idea that there are near-Gods of creativity amongst us is a potent one, particularly in a world that feels increasingly unpredictable.” On the destructive myth of the lone creative genius. | Document Journal
• Rebecca Solnit makes the case for planting roses in difficult times. | The Nation
• “Even the act of creation, the attempts at creation, creates all these ripples in the world.” Esmé Weijun Wang interviews Andrew Garfield. | The Believer
• Ruth Franklin discusses Shirley Jackson’s diverse career and critical renaissance. | Guernica
• What’s behind a conservative-led campaign to ban books that address “race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities” from schools? | The Guardian
• “If it’s true that prison education cannot change prisons, I’m not sure I could renounce it given a second chance.”
• Daniel Fernandez on the purgatory of prison classrooms. | The Baffler
• Twelve years after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Kettly Mars reflects on the literature of the disaster. | Words Without Borders
  
• Suzanne Van Atten looks at Imani Perry’s South to America, which contends “that the South has had a tremendous impact on the history of our nation and that it continues to exert significant influence today.” | LARB
• Kyle Chayka unpacks the ingenious simplicity of Wordle. | The New Yorker
• A highly anticipated cookbook has been delayed because all the copies of it (probably) sank to the bottom of the sea. | Grub Street
• “Above all, an artist needs to learn to think in the medium they are working in. Whatever that is.” Lincoln Michel on why a fiction writer must be a fiction reader. | Countercraft
• “I’m less interested in the volume of work than in doing work I really find value in. Which is very different than operating under the clock of capitalism.” Bryan Washington discusses care and craft. | The Atlantic
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Also on Lit Hub:

Imani Perry on writing the story of the American South • Maggie Rowe collects words to live by from The Golden Girls • Luke Cassidy makes a case for turning down tepid book deals • Kate Colby muses on pareidolia • Ricky Tucker on Paris Is Burning and the magic of queer blackness • Eileen Pollack on her father’s deathbed hallucinations • Emma Knight finds comfort in the diaries of Virginia Woolf • Jessamine Chan and Crystal Hana Kim discuss American parenting culture • Francesca Stavrakopoulou on “divine footprints” • 10 books for being alone • David L. Ulin wanders the back streets of Old Hollywood • Tomiko Brown-Nagin looks at the early career of Constance Baker Motley • A brief history of the American clothing industry