Lit Hub Daily: August 17, 2022

• “I want you to be more. You can be less if you’re going to sell real estate, but not if you’re going to be an artist.” Thoughts from a psychoanalyst and clown school graduate. | Lit Hub Psychology

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• In which the galaxy gets a kick out of humans’ creation myths. | Lit Hub History

• “I am a performer and a monk.” Sidik Fofano on being a shy debut author. | Lit Hub Writing Life

• Miriam Parker has notes for Nora Ephron and When Harry Met Sally’s Sally Albright, about the “big dead end” of turning 40. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Reflections on Ulysses, Brexit, and the Jewish community in Dublin. | Lit Hub

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• Alicia Thompson on finding love in the time of serial killers. | CrimeReads

• Sarah Shaffi breaks down the past, present, and future of literary festivals, along with what organizers say needs to change. | The Guardian

• “We need an abolition movement because what the system is for is the problem.” Hugh Ryan on how researching a women’s prison contributed to his thinking on incarceration. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Want to read the Game of Thrones series from the beginning? Adam Morgan shows you where to start. | Esquire

• What should you read next? Flowcharts from a bookseller at A Room of One’s Own (Madison, WI) can help the overwhelmed reader. | The New York Times

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• Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer, has died at 72. | HuffPost

• Lili Anolik explores the fraught (and generative) friendship between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. | Vanity Fair

• “Is publishing about art or commerce? The answer, of course, is ‘Both’—as with any creative business—but watching each side wrestle with that ambiguity has been instructive.” Katy Waldman on the trial that’s gripped the book world. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub: Dur e Aziz Amna in praise of intertextuality • New poetry by Gregory Orr • Read from Bernardo Atxaga’s newly translated novel, Water Over Stones (tr. Margaret Jull Costa and Thomas Bunstead)