Lit Hub Daily: April 9, 2019

• Channel Obama, tell a story, drink if you must: Viet Thanh Nguyen on how not to bore your audience at a reading. | Lit Hub
• “Honesty is non-negotiable.” Russell Brand on rehab, recovery, and choosing the right mentor. | Lit Hub
• “I count among my ancestors Jezda, flying about in her mortar and pestle; Syrenka swimming through the dark Polish waters.” How Michelle Tea found a spiritual home in her Polish heritage. | Lit Hub
• In Sri Lanka, a writing workshop that aims for peace after decades of civil war. | Lit Hub
• Untangling a woman’s mistakes from her character: Clare Fisher on teaching incarcerated women. | Lit Hub
• 5 writers, 7 questions, no wrong answers: Angie Kim, Jennifer Dubois, and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub
• Nina Revoyr talks power, privilege, and the contradictions of Los Angeles, with Steph Cha. | CrimeReads
• The Risk of Us author Rachel Howard on five great writer biographies, from Flaubert to Chekhov, Joan Didion to Jean Rhys. | Book Marks
• “Lawrence was not dressing up as any old Bedouin. He was dressing up as a sharif: in other words, as royalty.” Isabelle Hammad on the sartorial statements of Lawrence of Arabia. | The Paris Review
• How do you write a memoir when you can’t remember? Hint: you may need WhatsApp. | Granta
• “It stands in stark opposition to the materialism and individualism that otherwise define our culture. It is defiantly, proudly, communal.” Sue Halpern in praise of public libraries. | New York Review of Books
• A growing body of work,” including a new study in the journal Nature Human Behavior, suggests that Beowulf was the work of a single author. | The Guardian
• “Unwilling to give the literary culture that had turned against him the satisfaction of seeing him wounded, he stopped writing novels, or even referring to himself as a novelist at all”: Whatever happened to Nelson Algren, the bard of the down-and-out? | The New Yorker
• The state of Kansas will have to pay more than $168,000 in legal fees for attempting to prevent the sale of private notes by one of the lead investigators of the Clutter family murders, the subject of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. | KCUR 89.3
• John Oliver’s picture book about Mike Pence’s (gay) bunny is number two on the ALA’s list of “Most Challenged” books of 2018. | ABC News

Also on Lit Hub: When even your imaginary male muses don’t measure up • A poem from Rebecca Hazelton’s collection Gloss • Read from Christian Kiefer’s new novel, Phantoms