Lit Hub Daily: August 10, 2017

• To live like the women of Viking literature: Linnea Hartsuyker writes against “princess” culture. | Literary Hub
• On writing as work: Marlon James doesn’t like the word “inspiration.” | Literary Hub
• Are Virginia Woolf’s literary time-shifts based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity? | Literary Hub
• There are strong similarities between Michael Corleone and Alexander Portnoy: A 1969 review of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. | Book Marks
• “Realism is so unrealistic, actually, so artificial: and writers, if they’re any good, are intensely and pleasurably aware of deploying that artifice.” Sarah Hall and Tessa Hadley in conversation. | Granta
• On the novels of Deborah Levy, “connoisseur of the ways that strangeness can start to take root.” | The Nation
• “I didn’t really try very hard to separate the food-writing me and the fiction-writing me. It’s all just kind of a jumbled mess in my brain.” An interview with Rachel Khong. | Bookforum
• An “unlikely collaboration between an Orthodox wing of the Christian faith and cutting-edge science” will bring us the lost poems and religious texts from the oldest continually operating library in the world. | The Atlantic
• Probing the structural, socioeconomic forces that drive gentrification: On How to Kill a City, Gentrifier, and Making Rent in Bed-Stuy. | The New Republic
• Ava DuVernay will adapt Octavia Butler’s Dawn for the screen, marking “the first time that Science Fiction Hall of Famer’s. . . work has been adapted for TV.” | Deadline

Also on Lit Hub: Tessa Dare reports from Orlando at the Romance Writers of America conference · Charlie Jane Anders on the difficulty staying ahead of the present · “Motherly,” from Caitlin Hamilton Summie’s new collection.