Lit Hub Daily: May 4, 2017

TODAY: In 1939, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is published. 

• Ben Lerner on the porous boundaries of literature, truth, and plagiarism. | Literary Hub
• On the vital importance of the NEA and NEH, which saved literature in Tennessee. | Literary Hub
• Dani Shapiro on the grueling nature of book tours, the difficult task of writing while reading, and . . . marriage. | Literary Hub
• “Ivanka makes Sheryl Sandberg look like Rosa Luxemburg.” Slate reviews Ivanka Trump’s “vapid… gaslighting” book of career and life advice, Women Who Work. | Book Marks
• Colson Whitehead has been shortlisted for the 2017 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, alongside Becky Chambers, Yoon Ha Lee, and others. | The Guardian
• “My nudity wasn’t transactional; I didn’t give it away, and it wasn’t taken from me, either.” Edan Lepucki on posing nude for photographers as a young woman. | ELLE
• It is becoming impossible to remain neutral: Stacie Williams on librarians embracing the political. | Literary Hub
• Three months after the The New York Times cut 10 categories from its Best Sellers lists, “sales are hurting for several of the eliminated categories.” | The Outline
• How Trump’s ignorance is driving historians, “a generally sober and restrained people,” to speak out and “defend historical facts in an age of ‘alternative’ ones.” | The New Republic
• The long-awaited trailer for the thrice delayed film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower has finally arrived. | Flavorwire
• On Dorit Rabinyan’s All the Rivers, a Palestinian-Israeli love story that “drew the ire of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government.” | The New York Times
• “Our parasite was a new and mysterious development. It was gross, but it gave us something to talk about.” Short fiction by Jess Arndt. | Recommended Reading
• The search for a lost self in the far North: Sallie Tisdale wanders out onto the ice. | Literary Hub

Also on Literary Hub: How the Library of Congress came to define obscenity · Shanghai noir: Crime fiction from China’s “capital of cool” · An excerpt from Hala Alyan’s debut, Salt Houses

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