Lit Hub Daily: August 8, 2019

• “The greatest menace to the writer is the reader.” (And other gems of wisdom from Shirley Jackson.) | Lit Hub
• Brandon Shimoda on the work of five artists who explore Japanese-American incarceration and internment. | Lit Hub
• “I was never the hero, the zombie slayer, or the magic wielder.” On the history (and future) of YA and speculative fiction by Black women. | Lit Hub
• “The trouble began almost immediately.” Rick Moody on the curious case of the cursed Charles Manson autograph. | Lit Hub
• When plastic grew on trees: a brief history of tagua—“the greatest curiosity of the age.” | Lit Hub
• “By the mid-1980s, after a decade or so of gains for women under the law, progress ground to a halt.” On the great infertility scare of the 1980s. | Lit Hub
• Growing up, Laura McHugh didn’t see her community reflected in pop culture – until she found rural noir. | CrimeReads
• Jia Tolentino’s elegantly incisive essays, Téa Obreht’s sublime sophomore novel, Margaret Atwood on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and more of the reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
• “It doesn’t seem to occur to him that poets of color might be expanding the audience for poetry or creating new readerships; their gain can only be his loss.” Timothy Yu responds to Bob Hickok’s now-infamous essay about the future of poetry. | The New Republic
• “You are always too young to read Morrison.” Doreen St. Félix on speaking to her mother through Toni Morrison. | The New Yorker
• David Grossman’s 2017 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, A Horse Walks Into a Bar, has been optioned for a film adaptation. | The Jerusalem Post
• After a “decade of legal wrangling,” a missing selection of Kafka’s papers are now on display at Israel’s national library. | The Guardian
• “What is translation if not an intimate act between two people, away from the eyes of the world?” Jennifer Croft on the “daily alchemy” of her craft. | NYRB
• The strange story of Frank Sheeran, the Teamster unionist who claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa, and whose life inspired a book and Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman. | Slate
• “If I felt the world could be a frightening place — and I did — then these drawings, these stories, offered a kind of validation.” Victor LaValle on the comforting terror of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Brock Clarke on capturing the messy, individual voices of his hometown, Little Falls, NY • Urgency and inspiration at the 2019 New York City Poetry Festival • Read an excerpt from Kira Jane Buxton’s debut novel Hollow Kingdom.