Lit Hub Daily: December 6, 2019

• From Ophelia to Ottessa: Angela Qian charts the progression of the lonely literary woman. | Lit Hub
• John F. Callahan looks at what decades of Ralph Ellison’s correspondence reveal about the literary giant. | Lit Hub
• What happened to rock and roll after Altamont? Buzz Poole on the Grateful Dead’s “New Speedway Boogie,” and the true end of the sixties. | Lit Hub Music
• Mark Harris on the unapologetic—and still deeply resonant—politics of Howard Fast, the novelist, essayist, poet, and playwright who stood up to Joseph McCarthy. | Lit Hub History
• “Having kids doesn’t affect your talent, it only affects your resources.” How Pen Parentis creates a literary community for writers raising children. | Lit Hub
• Five great books from November you may have missed (and which would make great gifts!). | Lit Hub
• “New Journalism was my first experience of the recognition of the complexity of reality, the impossibility of truth.” Gillian Conoley’s path from journalism to poetry. | Lit Hub
• Dictators, diamond dynasties, and dead astronauts all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Lowlifes, junkies, ex-cons and desperados: Tanner Tafelski on the noir sensibility of Tom Waits in 10 songs. | CrimeReads
• “Our branding defines us, but it also doesn’t, but it also does.” Darcie Wilder on “the age of post-normcore.” | The Outline
• “In a world awash in possible dystopias, why this particular one? And why now?
” Kristen Roupenian on The Testaments. | The New Republic
• As a teenager in 1902, Mary MacLane authored a book that made her an “immediate sensation” and a scandal. Penelope Rosemont does a deep dive on the author. | The Paris Review
• At 29 years old, Mary Jean Chan, a former business school student turned poet from Hong Kong, has been taking the British poetry scene by storm. | Post Magazine
• Why in the world are well-known liberal writers contributing to Quillette, the online magazine of the “intellectual dark web”? | The Nation
• In a way, every novel is a revenge novel, but Norway has taken it to another level. | The Guardian
• Take a tour of Rachel Kushner’s art collection. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Read a poem by Hannah Brooks-Motl from her collection Earth • Bohumil Hrabal remembers what it was to fall in love with literature • A story by Howard Fast from the collection The General Zapped an Angel.