Lit Hub Daily: April 12, 2019

• “The most interesting place exists between how people see themselves and how other people do.” Wright Thompson on the fine art of American sportswriting. | Lit Hub
• “Literary propaganda was a company-wide preoccupation.” The CIA scheme that brought Doctor Zhivago to the world. | Lit Hub
• Surviving false dawns: Justine Hyde on Joy Division and life in a far-flung suburb. | Lit Hub
• “Beverly Cleary’s vision is a balm.” How Ramona Quimby helps kids make sense of this unstable world. | Lit Hub
• “Poetry showed me I was not alone.” Reading Neruda and learning to heal the wounds of diaspora. | Lit Hub
• “A machine for undermining orthodoxy.” Eight books that define (and defy) the canon of hip hop literature. | Lit Hub
• “Once a character is in motion—in the act of doing—the words and actions he performs are easy to imagine.” On applying the lessons of acting to storytelling. | Lit Hub
• Reclaiming anger and denial: a Red Ink roundtable on the weaponization of emotion. | Lit Hub
• “I realized that before I died I wanted to write a mystery series with a female cop. This would be for me…” Rachel Howzell Hall on writing procedurals, renouncing expectations, and ushering in new voices. | CrimeReads
• The New York Public Library yesterday announced its Young Lions Fiction Award finalists. | Book Marks
• New titles from Susan Choi, Robert Caro, Philip Kerr, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• “You will live in a cave in the woods, grow a long beard, write on bark. A crow will deliver your work to the big wigs in NYC.” Lucy Corin suggests some fortunes for a writers’ cootie catcher. | McSweeney’s
• After a public outcry, the Washington Department of Corrections has reversed their ban on used books entering prisons via nonprofits. | The Seattle Times
• Aja Romano argues that the Hugo Award nomination for the Archive of Our Own, one of the most popular internet archives of fan fiction, represents a victory for “misfits and marginalized members of society.” | Vox
• “I think the voice in the book is pretty chill and neutral.” Read a chill, neutral interview with Bret Easton Ellis. | The New Yorker
• “By foregrounding the story of one extraordinary man, Blight also delivers the larger story of four of the most dramatic decades in our national history”: Mary Corey on David Blight’s monumental biography of Frederick Douglass. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Here are the finalists for the NYPL’s 2019 Young Lions Fiction Award. | NYPL

Also on Lit Hub: On the New Books Network, Charlie Jane Anders talks space colonization, permanent midnight, and nuclear war • Lit Hub Recommends • A poem by KC Trommer from her collection We Call Them Beautiful • “I Am Tom Waits!”: a story from Janice Margolis’ collection Termination Shocks