Lit Hub Daily: January 27, 2020

• Best procrastination ever: Did Tolkien write The Lord of the Rings because he was avoiding his academic work? | Lit Hub
• The bad news is that the machines are coming; the good news is that they still haven’t mastered metaphor, as evidenced by these poems. | Lit Hub Tech
• Patrick Modiano on Françoise Frenkel, the writer and bookshop owner who escaped the Nazis. | Lit Hub History
• “What time is it? One or two in the morning? This is no time for watches… let it go.” Searching for Guernica during a night at the Picasso Museum. | Lit Hub Art
• Crime and the City heads to Prague, where Cold War espionage has given way to post-Soviet mafiosos and partying tourists. | CrimeReads
• “It’s the power and pain of the Odd Woman to be singular, forever apart. She has the clarity of an impartial observer even when she feels the zeal of a convert.” Read a profile of Vivian Gornick. | The Cut
• Most peculiar! The Nancy Drew series celebrates the heroine’s 90th anniversary by killing her off—and putting the Hardy Boys on the case. | Polygon
• E. Jean Carroll’s What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal details the writer’s rape by the sitting president. It’s also “a work of comic genius.” | The New Yorker
• Happy Lunar New Year! Here are some children’s books to help celebrate the holiday. | Book Riot
• In response to the controversy around American Dirt, Flatiron Books says it is “carefully listening to the conversation around the novel, including the question of who gets to tell which stories.” | Publishers Weekly
• Rumaan Alam on why we’re fascinated with the grisly case of Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end convicted of murder. | The New Republic
• Julia Alvarez, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Ling Ma, and more recommend books for uncertain times. | The Chicago Tribune

Also on Lit Hub: An illustrated reading list of groundbreaking mixed-media literature • Read from Magda Szabó’s newly-translated novel Abigail (trans. Len Rix).