Lit Hub Weekly: December 21 - 23, 2020

• 40 bookstores in 40 weeks: J. David Gonzalez on the habit-forming pastime of buying books. | Lit Hub Bookstores
• “What kind of jerk-off would want to go to a sentence festival, anyway?” Does Goodreads have a problem with books by women, about women? | Lit Hub Literary Criticism
• “Have you ever spent a day slumped at your desk, achieving barely anything?” What has—and hasn’t—changed about workplace drinking culture. | Lit Hub Health
• Parul Sehgal on Raven Leilani’s Luster, Merve Emre on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and more of the Best Book Reviews of 2020. | Book Marks
• The traditional mystery just had a banner year, and our editors are rounding up the best new offerings from a genre on the rise. | CrimeReads
• A mysterious thief—who must be an industry insider—has been targeting authors, agents, and editors in a bizarre, years-long phishing scam. | The New York Times
• “The book seems almost purpose-made for this moment. Marco Polo describes Kublai Kahn’s empire to him, and I sit in my bedroom trying to remember what the inside of a bar sounded like.” On reading Italo Calvino in Boston during a pandemic. | Ploughshares
• “Putting together a novel is essentially putting together the lives of strangers I’m coming to know. In some ways it’s not unlike putting together my own life.” Ann Patchett on friendship, cancer, the pandemic, magic mushrooms, and Tom Hanks. | Harper’s
• “Surrealist art, with its convulsive, outlandish juxtapositions, showed Carrington how to . . . cavort with nonhuman creatures, drawing on their beauty and suffering to make tame ideas about character and plot more porous, elastic, and gloriously unhinged.” Merve Emre on Leonora Carrington. | The New Yorker
• “Let’s get this death thing straight.” Vanessa Guignery on her journey through the papers of Julian Barnes. | Ransom Center Magazine
• “If you want to know the story of a place, walk it.” Craig Mod on storytelling and long-distance walking. | Chicago Review of Books
• In Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story, a hallmark of holiday season nostalgia, “a darker message is at play that resonates uncannily well today.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “To the extent that mainstream publishing wants to be political it focuses on insider tell-alls and presidential memoirs.” Viet Thanh Nguyen on literature post-Trump. | The New York Times
• Want to feel hungry? Read Bryan Washington on his year in takeout orders. | The New Yorker
• Publishers’ policies around e-books are “bolting an adamantine layer of technology onto the world’s classrooms, in what amounts to a stealth form of privatization.” | The New Republic
• What’s the key to reviving a dead language? | JSTOR Daily

Also on Lit Hub:

Here are the ten biggest literary stories of 2020 • Rick Bass on our deep winter solstice dreams and the spring to come • Sara B. Franklin on the best kids’ reads of this pandemic year • Alice Bohling on the revolutionary potential of mutual aid • Kelly Conaboy on the intuition-based work of the animal communicator • How the tweeness of e.e. cummings’s “little treat” manages to transcend holiday kitsch • Lorna Dee Cervantes on the interplay between Beat and Chicano poetry • Nick Offerman really loves Wendell Berry • Todd Gitlin on the defeat of Donald Trump • Hard to imagine Mary McCarthy’s The Group was dismissed as a “lady-writer’s novel.” And yet • Deborah Tannen on finding her father through his relationship with Judaism • On the rookie year of a baseball legend • You could certainly do worse than being stuck with Shakespeare during a plague • Want a little Kropotkin in your YA? On the rise of literary theory in American academia • Dear readers, thank you for spending some of this bizarre and terrible year with us at Lit Hub dot com: here are the ten stories you read the most and here are our favorite Lit Hub stories of the year

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

Mystery author Jacqueline Winspear remembers a wholesome holiday crime • The best international crime fiction of 2020 • “Crime and the City” visits Cape Town, South Africa’s hub of urban cool • Olivia Rutigliano on a ghostly Christmas tradition • Here are our choices for the year’s best crime and mystery criticism • Molly Odintz surveys the best historical crime fiction of 2020 • Stephanie Graves honors the wartime heroism of the humble homing pigeon • Curtis Evans looks at Something for Everyone, a cult classic of queer mystery cinema • Sharon Doering on the unnervingly universal potential for violence • Counting down the most iconic Christmas-set crime cinema