Literary Hub - Lit Hub Daily: May 17, 2021

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Lit Hub Daily

In an era of endless Zillow scrolling, Nora Caplan-Bricker considers the novels of Tana French, “in which the lust for property is always primary to the plot, and always somehow morally deforming.” | Lit Hub Criticism

“A cliché is just a metaphor that’s been destroyed by its own success.” Edward St. Aubyn in conversation with Merlin Sheldrake. | Lit Hub

Your week in virtual book events, featuring K-Ming Chang, Lydia Millet, and Rachel Kushner. | Lit Hub

Grieving with Seneca: Nancy Sherman on what the stoics can teach us about grief. | Lit Hub Philosophy

Brenda Peynado makes a case for fabulism as the new sincerity: “It’s truth-telling in a world that won’t believe us.” | Lit Hub

How Meg Bashwiner and Joseph Fink wrote a joint memoir... without getting divorced. | Lit Hub

Twelfth Night, Paradise, War and Peace, and more rapid-fire book recs from Alice Miller. | Book Marks

“Dissent has started to appear to me as a series of slow, uncoiling choices, inexorable change.” Jen Silverman on learning to make a scene. | Lit Hub

Exorcising ghosts: J. Nicole Jones considers local legends, family folklore, and the “alluring and otherworldly” atmosphere of the South. | The Rumpus

“A journey from and through hell takes the most pleasure in the proximity of a duo who mean no harm.” Blair McClendon on Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of The Underground Railroad. | 4Columns

“Did I need to train like a superhero just to be a person in America? Maybe.” Alexander Chee recalls his father’s lessons in self-defense. | GQ

Colson Whitehead and Margaret Atwood discuss the challenges and possibilities of adaptation. | TIME

“I had to face the reality that my father will never enter a free Palestine in his lifetime.” Randa Abdel-Fattah on the struggle for Palestinian voices to be heard. | Meanjin 

“It is a quirk of literary history that the cutting edge of 21st-century Anglophone literary fiction looks so very similar to the shishōsetsu of early 20th-century Japan.” On Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel and the Japanese tradition of autofiction. | Boston Review 

“This is a novel about the dark side of ambition.” Joy Lanzendorfer breaks down the problem with the “California dream” and its effect on her work. | Alta

When Laurin Mayeno’s children’s book about gender diversity was banned in her area, she began an initiative to get it to as many kids as possible. | HuffPost

Who gets to dictate how a story is told? Layla AlAmmar guests, on First Draft. 

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Listen to a narrated essay about what we can learn from the survival narratives
of Noah’s Ark, on Emergence Magazine. 

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In light of his posthumous reputation, what can we still take from Philip Larkin? This week on The History of Literature. 

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Director Nick Ebeling unpacks the enigma of Dennis Hopper, on Big Table.

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