Lit Hub Daily: April 29, 2019

• “Is it really such a shame that he was wise enough to take the lead and soar ahead, beyond the reaches of the masses?” Yukio Mishima on the beautiful death of James Dean. | Lit Hub
• Leila Slimani doesn’t care if you’re uncomfortable: the author of The Perfect Nanny sits down with John Freeman. | Lit Hub
• “Art arrives out of a tension between the private and the public…” David Means on the world as inspiration. | Lit Hub
• As Sri Lanka goes, so goes the world: Ru, Duranya, and Hasadri Freeman on the radiating power of love and terror. | Lit Hub
• “What I want for my son—what I wish for him to become, rather than avoid becoming—doesn’t yet seem to exist.” On raising a boy in America. | Lit Hub
• Two tyrants, two poets, and a long pilgrimage to Milan: the journey that changed Geoffrey Chaucer’s life. | Lit Hub
• Curtis Evans guides us through T. S. Eliot’s longtime love affair with detective fiction. | CrimeReads
• Eudora Welty on Charlotte’s Web, Dorothy Parker on Winnie the Pooh, and more classic reviews of beloved children’s books. | Book Marks
• This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians: Emily Drabinski on The Watermelon Woman and libraries vs. the global elite. | Book Marks
• In which Nathan Goldman compares Gregor Samsa to Kanye West. | LARB
• “We were just jamming. Life, God, books, movies. Life, God, books, movies.” Anne Lamott got married, you guys. | The New York Times
• The Astro Poets would like to inform us that Clarissa Dalloway is a Virgo, Daisy Buchanan is a Libra, and Esther Greenwood is—of course—a Scorpio. | The Paris Review
• “The women characters rarely end up free.” A tribute to the “recently re-appreciated” writer Rachel Ingalls. | Longreads
• “By listening, you partially reclaim the lost hours.” On audiobooks and the scourge of endless hustle. | The Baffler
• After facing a leadership controversy that threatened the credibility of the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy has appointed its new permanent secretary, literary professor Mats Malm. | France 24
• Read an interview with Chinese dissident author Ma Jian, who has been protesting literary censorship in China for decades. | TIME

Also on Lit Hub: On But That’s Another Story, Keith Gessen talks to Will Schwalbe about Soviet publishing and his roundabout path to writing fiction • Edward Said on the death of American activist Rachel Corrie • A poem by Pulitzer Prize finalist A.E. Stallings from her collection LIKE • Read a story from Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s collection Let’s Tell This Story Properly.