Lit Hub Daily: January 13, 2021

• “I never, not once, paused to think about why my world was not reflected back to me in the books that I read.” Siphiwe Ndlovu on discovering Zimbabwean literature as a Zimbabwean writer. | Lit Hub
• Lincoln’s antislavery politics: James Oakes outlines the president’s convoluted plan for abolition. | Lit Hub
• Melissa Albert suggests six disorienting books to jolt you out of your doomscroll spiral. | Lit Hub
• “The fires, the parachute bombs, the flying glass, and the corpses provided an improbable backdrop for discussions of the antiquarian book trade.” A portrait of Graham Greene’s life during World War II. | Lit Hub
• Kenneth Rosen recommends some great reported creative nonfiction, from A Fan’s Notes to The Orchid Thief. | Lit Hub
• Kimberly Truhler on film noir, fashion, and the iconic outfits that defined Laura. | CrimeReads
  
• “The most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness”: Edmund Wilson’s 1922 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses. | Book Marks
  
• “A dictatorship is not created overnight. A genocide or a civil war does not arise out of thin air.” A conversation with Hannah Arendt’s new biographer. | The.Ink
• The case of the watered-down genre, or: who killed Nordic noir? | Public Books 
• “As I said, I was the soft one. Maybe that’s why I was so desperate to escape.” Rachel Kushner on coming of age in San Francisco. | The New Yorker 
• Returning to John Lithgow’s utopian fiction, which pioneered a radical literary approach to politics. | JSTOR Daily
• “I don’t think you ever can escape your subjectivity, not totally, and while I do think looking outwards is always a good idea for a writer, starting from the self does not seem like a bad thing to me.” An interview with Madeleine Watts. | The Believer
• For a mere $800, you too can own an original hardcover from the series on which “Bridgerton” is based. | Los Angeles Times

Also on Lit Hub: Inside Algeria’s early “kingdom of wine” • Martha Cooley on the uses of boredom • Read from Mikael Niemi’s newly translated novel To Cook a Bear (trans. by Deborah Bragan-Turner).