Lit Hub Daily: August 22, 2019

• FALL 2019 NONFICTION PREVIEW: All this week we’ve been highlighting our most anticipated books on a variety of subjects, from politics and social science to memoir and essay collections, and more. On tap today: history and biography. | Lit Hub
• “A Thurber must be seen to be believed—there is no use trying to tell the plot of it.” Dorothy Parker—born on this day in 1893—on the art of her old pal James Thurber. | Lit Hub
• The cautious optimism of Lenin’s Tomb: Luke Harding revisits David Remnick’s classic 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. | Lit Hub
• Poetry as pick-up line: Sara Martin on reciting Paul Celan to expedite intimacy. | Lit Hub
• Lara Vapnyar on the book that made her weep for hours, Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog. | Lit Hub
• “The poem carries us towards other regions on earth, northwards.” J.M.G. Le Clézio on the expansive, immersive quality of great poetry. | Lit Hub
• Blair Braverman on the last untamed frontier, Walter Kirn on the Oregon standoff, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• J. Kingston Pierce on the remarkable rise of regional noir in the 1970s. | CrimeReads
• “What we spend money on—especially in a business where there isn’t enough to go around—is a statement of what we value”: Daniel Hahn on the politics of literary prize money and the virtues of shortlists. | The Guardian
• Teow Lim Goh argues that discussions of “likability”, in literature as in politics, is a gendered issue that often obscures the humanity of female characters. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “What is the moral sense? Where does it come from? Is it intrinsic? If not, does that discredit morality itself?” Rachel Cusk considers Françoise Sagan. | The New Yorker
• “I suppose at base we are all unstable narrators in an unstable world”: Helen Phillips and Laura Van Den Berg in conversation. | The Paris Review
• On the joys and pains and financial quandaries of being a travelling actor, including performing “two hours of Shakespearean comedy while gesticulating wildly in the hopes of making a 400-year-old dick joke land.” | The Outline
• “Reel it back in, Bucko. Let’s not balance this checkbook just yet. Anyway, that’s what someone told me once.” Read a new short story by Catherine Lacey. | Harper’s
• Books about insects are getting a lot of buzz(zzz) these days. | Outside

Also on Lit Hub: A prose poem by Alissa Quart from her collection Thoughts and Prayers • The feints and jabs of Polari, Britain’s gay slang • Read an excerpt of Rick Moody’s novella One-Eyed Jack from the Spring 2019 issue of Conjunctions.