Lit Hub Daily: March 17, 2021

• On the two kinds of Nabokov readers: those who think he “illuminates the real world, and those who think he is confined to a literary playground.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• “We’re not hooked by what the protagonist is doing; we’re on the hunt for why they’re doing it.” Lisa Cron on what we really want from a story. | Lit Hub
• “Ceaselessly we were witnesses to this presidential psychodrama, and the round-the-clock availability of Twitter meant that it played out almost every waking hour of almost every day.” Nick Bryant on the most performative presidency of all time. | Lit Hub Politics
• Do novels about writers have their own subgenre yet? David Laskin considers the irresistibility of writing what we know. | Lit Hub
• “O’Connor suggests that compassion—as shown by a writer by way of her fiction—is important only to nitwits and cowards.” Brock Clarke makes a case for meanness in fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Kelly McMasters reflects on finding her way back to writing—as a newly divorced single mom—through editing an anthology of women writers. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “In Japan, there is a frontier between life and death, and it’s perched on the steep slopes of a mountain called Kujira-yama.” Laura Imai Messina on Japan’s wind phone. | Lit Hub Travel
• Angeline Boulley recommends five novels about solving crimes in Native communities. | CrimeReads
• The Lover, King Lear, A Little Life, and more rapid-fire book recs from Sanaë Lemoine. | Book Marks
• “All children’s literature, by its very nature, toes the line between propaganda and pleasure.” Considering the wave of children’s books by political candidates. | Times Literary Supplement
• Navajo Nation poet laureate Laura Tohe on Deb Haaland and the profound significance of a Native American Secretary of the Interior. | Deseret News
• “The history of New Directions is a history of 20th-century literature.” Mark Haber’s ode to the iconic publisher. | Lit Hub
• “For most of us, the tipping clue about a character being queer is the same sensation we get when we recognize another queer person on the street.” Michael Elias on queer-coding and queer-reading in literature. | Catapult
• “That’s the thing about surviving the white gaze: It’s the default. It’s everywhere. It’s the air.” Rebecca Carroll on her memoir, the institution of whiteness, and adoption. | Bitch Media
• Read this year’s NBCC Award finalists: Carlin Romano on Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business. | Lit Hub
• Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga is the first African woman to win the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom. | Brittle Paper
• “Within our racial discourse there’s often no room for the Asian American voice, which is precisely why I wrote the book.” Alexander Chee and Cathy Park Hong discuss how the pandemic has cracked open discrimination against Asian American communities. | GEN
• “I wanted to invite whatever disaster, complication, or weirdness into it just to see what would happen.” Chang-rae Lee on what it takes to write creatively. | The Believer

Also on Lit Hub: Vivian Gornick looks back at the “wild and elusive” poet Edna St. Vincent Millay • On the sacred role of the hair metal ballad • Read a story from Jen Sprya’s new collection, Big Time