Lit Hub Daily: April 14, 2023

• Jena Friedman asks her favorite male comedians—Jon Stewart, Reggie Watts, and Bob Odenkirk among them—some of the inane questions she gets as a “woman in comedy.” | Lit Hub Humor

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• Why the culture around Great Books is hostile to trans people. (Or, why Ben Shapiro loves St. Augustine.) | Lit Hub Criticism

• Musings on the scientific underpinnings of poetry. | Lit Hub Poetry

• Sasha Velour reflects on Ru Paul’s Drag Race and the thriving art form of drag: “Drag will always exist, and it will always push against binaries.” | Lit Hub Memoir

• Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears, Mark Bowden’s Life Sentence, and Molly Prentiss’s Old Flame all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• Will Lloyd wonders how male literary novelists became terminally uncool. | The New Statesman

• “Books are the building blocks of civilization. They must be defended.” Fighting words from The Guardian about book bans. | The Guardian

• “I don’t want to publish just for the sake of publishing.” Don Winslow on retiring from writing to focus on activism. | New Zealand Herald

• “I’ve become more easily bored by plot. A little goes a long way.” Charles Frazier on his reading habits, favorite writers, and why some classics are better enjoyed later in life. | The New York Times

• “If we must incorporate a prescriptive morality into our reception of art, at least let it rest on epistemological rigor—on doing our due diligence.” Judith Shulevitz considers Claire Dederer’s Monsters, a moral reckoning with the moral reckoning of cancel culture. | The Atlantic

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Also on Lit Hub: Managing time in fiction • New poetry by Rebecca Foust • Read an excerpt from Karl Geary’s latest novel, Juno Loves Legs