Lit Hub Daily: January 12, 2021

• Navigating the intricacies of race and the violence of antiblackness: Nadia Owusu reflects on her early years in America. | Lit Hub
• “What happens when you go through two decades of your life calling yourself Argentine but have never been to Argentina?” Daniel Loedel on nationality and identity. | Lit Hub
• Changing my sky: Sarah Moss on moving countries amid a pandemic. | Lit Hub
• “The process of translating is endless—and enlarging.” Will Schutt interprets Carlo and Renzo Piano. | Lit Hub
• The writer’s life’s work is finding out how delightful they are on the page, and other (delightful) revelations from George Saunders. | Lit Hub
• Here is your (wildly optimistic) 2021 calendar of literary events. | Lit Hub
• You can kill anyone but the dog: Sulari Gentill on crime fiction’s most unbreakable rule. | CrimeReads
• Is Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint the dirtiest literary novel ever published? | Book Marks
• “This amazing sense of fortitude and strength really came across to me.” Heather Clark on discovering more of Sylvia Plath’s story through research. | Slate
• Houman Barekat on death, digital innovation, and what we do with the accounts of people who have died. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Why do we keep rereading The Great Gatsby? Wesley Morris has a few ideas. | The Paris Review
• Hundreds of historians and constitutional scholars, including Ron Chernow and Stacy Schiff, have signed an open letter calling for Trump’s (re)impeachment. | The New York Times
• “While it may well be that no book has ever prevented genocide or fascism, we still have a necessity for literature to testify to the political conditions of our lives.” On the literature of bearing witness. | Zocalo Public Square
• Revisiting 1965’s The Gay Cookbook, which “helped expose the very normalcy of queerness.” | JSTOR Daily
• “I cannot think of another contemporary poet who is willing to expose his vulnerability, worry, and pettiness through the lens of humor.” John Yau makes the case for Robert Hershon as a major poet. | Hyperallergic

Also on Lit Hub: Koa Beck on what “feminist” settings too often lack • Who gets to tell the story of the Midwest? Amanda Page on parachute journalism and its opposite • Read from Mateo Askaripour’s debut novel Black Buck.