Lit Hub Daily: September 24, 2021

• “Fitzgerald likes to rub rich people’s monstrousness against their beauty and thereby make sparks fly.” Andrew Martin and Benjamin Nugent discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald on his birthday. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• Biographer Jacques Berlinerblau on why it matters that the literary world lacks critical distance when it comes to Philip Roth. | Lit Hub Biography

• Yiyun Li takes ten writing lessons from War and Peace. | Lit Hub Craft

• “People just really love reading about kinky sex.” Leigh Cowart on the centuries-long success of sadomasochistic books, from Venus in Furs to Fifty Shades of Grey. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Is restoring “wildlife corridors” the key to solving climate change? | Lit Hub 

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• “You’d be reading the script and it would be like, ‘We’ve got to medical the medical until medical happens to medical.’” Behind the scenes of the Grey’s Anatomy writers’ room. | Lit Hub TV

• INTERVIEW WITH A JOURNAL: Everything you need to know about The Georgia Review. | Lit Hub

• Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani look to the past for solutions to handling “a crisis-ridden climatic future.” | Lit Hub Climate Change

• “I want to know what it is about the truth that prevents me from writing it. Why do I prefer my own version to the ‘real’ version?” Joshua Cohen talks to Lincoln Michel about The Netanyahus and interpreting truth. | Frieze

• On the big business of online book clubs and the female founders who are at the helm. | Marie Claire

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• Alice McDermott discusses making the leap to nonfiction and the mechanics of craft. | Bomb

• “There are many fine writers of literary fiction, maybe too many… but only one world’s richest lady.” Considering the novels of MacKenzie Bezos in the (all-consuming) context of her proximity to Amazon. | The Paris Review

• Incarcerated writers reflect on the mental, physical, and emotional toll the pandemic has taken. | The Drift

• You’ve seen this book cover: “amorphous daubs of warm, bright color,” “a blocky but refined sans serif.” R.E. Hawley breaks down the trend in book design. | Print

• Steve Kettmann pens a love letter to Green Apple Books in San Francisco, where each visit “had a way of both inspiring and exhausting me.” | The Bold Italic

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Also on Lit Hub: Thomas Gladysz shares tales from a decade of bookstore events • How the iconic late-night tv character Elvira came to be • Read a story from Casey Plett’s latest collection, A Dream of a Woman