Lit Hub Weekly: January 3 – 7, 2022

• “Nature is not sectioned off in this nonfiction, not treated as though it were separate from daily lives, or as though shared survival was not the most intimate thing imaginable.” Ingrid Horrocks on finding new ways to write about the world. | Lit Hub Nature

• Jessie Greengrass on why the act of writing is work. | Lit Hub

• Gonzo journalism as happy accident, revenge, collaboration: considering the legacy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. | Lit Hub

• Looking to Iris Murdoc and Cormac McCarthy to understand love as both attention and absorption. | Lit Hub Philosophy

• The most anticipated crime fiction of 2022, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. | CrimeReads

• Jean Chen Ho’s Fiona and Jane, Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague’s The Steal, and Alessandro Barbero’s Dante: A Life all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• The FBI has arrested Filippo Bernardini, who is accused of stealing hundreds of unpublished book manuscripts. | The New York Times

• Hilton Als: “No country but America could have produced Joan Didion. And no other country would have tolerated her.” | The New Yorker

• Jennifer Wilson considers Dostoevsky’s love-hate relationship with true crime. | The New Republic

• “Resolving to do the same thing each day, at the same time, has given my life a center.” Meghan O’Gieblyn embraces habit in an automated world. | Harper’s

• “Books are just widgets in the grand scheme of things.” Lisa Gitelman on the ways of looking at a book. | Public Books

• “Speaking of Asian American representation, maybe what we need is more representation of Asian American bimbos.” Jean Chen Ho discusses her novel Fiona and Jane. | BOMB

• Apparently, Pablo Neruda was almost denied the Nobel Prize because of his odes to Stalin. | The Guardian

• A brief history of the “enthralled imitations” of famous writers, from T.S. Eliot’s Chekhovian pince-nez to Beckett’s Joyce cosplay. | Times Literary Supplement

• Nell Zink translates three Stasi records from the 10-year surveillance of her friend, an environmental chemist. | n+1

• “Everybody knows Rosa Parks, but who are the people standing with her?” An interview with the woman on a mission to archive 125 years’ worth of Baltimore’s Black history. | Atlas Obscura

• What if your kids don’t like to read? Here’s what one educational consultant says. | Los Angeles Times

• Authors have won a $7.8 million default judgment in a piracy lawsuit against the overseas e-book operation, the KISS Library. | Publishers Weekly

• “I wrote the book while the rest of my life was up in the air, telling the stories of my elders as a grounding force and a guiding light.” Britni de la Cretaz on the personal power of writing queer histories. | Jezebel

• “Somewhere towards the 1960s the culture simply ran out of ways to shock.” On J.M. Coetzee and the limits of taboo breaking. | 3:AM Magazine

• Laura Miller analyzes two recent feminist spins on The Great Gatsby. | Slate

Also on Lit Hub:

Our (196!) most anticipated books of 2022 • Tiphanie Yanique on the power of the road narrative • Xochitl Gonzalez on leaving home in order to write about it • Antoine Wilson on his unconventional office—a hoodie • How Spider-Man broke the superhero mold  • On the tropes of climate writing • On the many miracles of Aretha Franklin • Yara Zgheib tells a love story in exile • Hawa Allan on transforming vulnerability into power • “To say that there is a renaissance in Native American fiction is an understatement” • The link between physical strength and a healthy brain • Laura Bogart on the catharsis of The Matrix Resurrections • How a stalled novelist became a data scientist • Just how good can a 41-year-old rookie tennis player get? • Why do we need sleep? • Literary film and TV to stream in 2022 • On the dramatic origins of women’s elite running • “Tie food to feeling above all else” • How a generation of women got their gossip • On George V and the demands of the suffragettes