Lit Hub Daily: December 9, 2019

• “Beneath the intricate workings of Handke’s text, one can hear the rumbles of some of the worst tendencies of our present age.” John Erik Riley travels to Bosnia to try to see what Peter Handke saw (or didn’t, as the case may be). | Lit Hub
• Meanwhile, Olga Tokarzcuk’s wonderful Nobel lecture, “The Tender Narrator,” can be read (or watched) here. | Nobel Prize
• Never mind the ballots: Fintan O’Toole on the unholy interplay between punk and Brexit. | Lit Hub Politics
• “Memo: do not drink coffee. It engenders baseless optimism about my powers of creation.” Read from the (impossibly delightful) diaries of Helen Garner. | Lit Hub
• How the 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe discovered a new star… with a piece of string. | Lit Hub History
• It’s long past time for our idea of “American fiction” to stop defaulting to “white and male.” | Lit Hub
• When designing the cover of The Prettiest Star, Luke Bird looked to Bowie. | Lit Hub
• In an evolving Medellín, locals and tourists struggle with the bloody legacy of Pablo Escobar. Journalist Dave Seminara has the story. | CrimeReads
• Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, and George Packer’s Our Man all feature among the Best Reviewed Memoir and Biography of 2019. | Book Marks
• “Ah, I thought, Umberto is just pretending to be dead. He’s really just floating on his back.” Portraits of Umberto Eco, Saul Steinberg, and Aldo Buzzi by Tullio Pericoli. | New York Review of Books
• In honor of the 50th anniversary of Greenwich Village’s designation as a New York City historic district, here are 31 literary icons associated with the neighborhood. | 6sqft
• “My pilgrimage, I hoped, might reveal some higher purpose hidden within our seemingly endless Indian losses.” Julian Brave NoiseCat on visiting Wounded Knee. | Harper’s
• Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a notoriously difficult book to adapt for film. A roundtable with a film scholar, McCarthy expert, and actor attempts to figure out why that is. | Mel Magazine
• Mesha Maren re-learned what “noir” meant after hearing critics use it to describe her book. | West Virginia Public Broadcasting
• Controversy around Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize win continues, with a member of the Swedish Academy announcing his intention to boycott the ceremony, and Handke himself refusing to address questions about his support of Slobodan Miloševic. | The Hub
• “Beauty and the jeer at beauty meet.” In a previously unpublished essay, HD muses on the Greek poet Theocritus. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: 91 theses on Lord Byron, graffiti, and bathroom stalls • Umberto Eco on the elusive concept of ugliness •  Read a story from S. P. Tenhoff’s debut collection The Involuntary Sojourner.