Lit Hub Daily: August 29, 2017

• Too smart or too pretty? Elisa Gabbert wrestles with the Anne of Green Gables paradox. | Literary Hub
• Behind the scenes at the US Open: up close with elite athletes in the time of Trump. | Literary Hub
• Do you even need to go back to school? Life advice from 15 famous writers. | Literary Hub
• Lit Hub Longform: My friend was the best fixer in Damascus. And she happened to be a woman. | Literary Hub
• What if your best friends are books? In praise of the solitary, the bookish, the diehard readers… | Literary Hub
• Whether George Smiley can match up to our deranged political times is another question altogether: On John le Carré’s first novel in 25 years. | The New Republic
• “If a writer is nothing, does nothing, and has nothing to say, what can he write about?” On the work of Fernando Pessoa (and his many fictional alter egos). | The New Yorker
• In which Chelsea Martin uses promoting her book as “an opportunity to confront Scott McClanahan about a few things.” | Fanzine
• “White colleagues routinely. . . called me lucky. They meant that Southern black boys like me were more likely to end up incarcerated than working beside wonderful white faculty at so-called elite liberal arts colleges.” Kiese Laymon on “luck,” privilege, and power. | BuzzFeed Reader
• “A boring piece without a real narrative: this formed all my impressions of contemporary American short fiction.” What happens when style is flattened in translation. | The Millions
• How did we do this and not kill each other? Jaya Saxena and Jess Zimmerman, the co-authors of Basic Witches, discuss their process. | Catapult
• From The Outsiders to The Hate U Give, 50 books that capture the high school experience. | B&N Reads
• A political and personal memoir that negotiates that vertiginous distance that exists between what America is and what it thinks of itself: Hisham Matar on Suzy Hansen’s memoir, Notes on a Foreign Country. | Book Marks

Also on Lit Hub: The books in Daniel Handler’s life, from Toni Morrison to Zilpha Keatley Snyder (but not Proust) · Five Books Making News: prizewinners, personalities, and… Knausgaard · From Ralf Rothmann’s new novel, To Die in Spring.