Lit Hub Daily: April 26, 2017

• Famous writers—from Eileen Myles to David Mitchell—on the books that first inspired them. | Literary Hub
• Harmony Holiday explores the ways in which Hollywood misrepresents the layers of Black experience. | Literary Hub
• Telling a refugee’s story: on the work of Valeria Luiselli and Mark Lyons. | Literary Hub
• Why you shouldn’t pick a fight with Jane Smiley, and other important lessons of historical novel-writing. | Literary Hub
• 5 reasons why a writer should move to Chicago (none of which are “pizza”). | Literary Hub
• William Gibson, a “prophet of the information age . . . credited with foreseeing the ways technology shapes our identity,” has written a novel about an alternate timeline in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential election. | The New York Times
• “Sometimes explanations are what we do when we can’t actually envision the future.” Jeff VanderMeer and Cory Doctorow in conversation. | Electric Literature
• Notorious frenemies J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had at least one thing in common: a hatred of Walt Disney’s Snow White. | Atlas Obscura
• Margaret Atwood made a feminist out of me: On the eve of its new Hulu adaptation, 12 writers reflect on The Handmaid’s Tale. | Elle
• “The brave new world is really just the brave old world with younger people.” A profile of Startup author and BuzzFeed culture writer Doree Shafrir. | NYLON
• The world took notice, and an overnight literary phenomenon was born: Revisiting Rosamond Lehmann’s debut novel Dusty Answer on its 90th anniversary. | The Paris Review
• “He had had a two-year head start on being American, and occasionally he’d make a flourish of demonstrating it.” Jenny Xie’s “Lucky Frank,” the first place winner of Joyland’s 2017 Open Border Fiction Prize. | Joyland

Also on Lit Hub: Lisa Levy recommends five great crime reads for May · Hannah Tinti learns to shoot a gun · From Fredrik Backman’s latest novel, Beartown.