Lit Hub Daily: February 14, 2019

• “Here, you can be silly and sweeping and hopeful, and no one will judge.” A love letter to lovers of Outlander. | Lit Hub
• “We actually have to live through these characters and feel their feelings, so nothing is made up.” Yiyun Li in conversation with Michele Filgate. | Lit Hub
• “Ideas are never frozen in their time and place, nor are they vapors that float in some otherworldly, transcendent realm.” On the intellectual genealogy of the United Stated. | Lit Hub
• “Compression narrows an experience, emotion, or image to the point of greatest intensity.” On literary minimalism. | Lit Hub
• “There are so many layers of narrative in food and wine…” 11 writers on our hunger for novels about food. | Lit Hub
• “I’m not on a mission, but I think a writer has to talk about what’s in front of them, even when writing about shape-shifting creatures.” Kima Jones profiles Marlon James. | Poets & Writers
• “There is a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming about an island.” Read a story by Tove Jansson, translated for the first time into English by Hernán Diaz. | The Paris Review
• How did Valentine become the patron of love? Geoffrey Chaucer had more than a little to do with it. | History Extra
• “I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind.” Patricia Lockwood on the infinite scream of the internet. | LRB
• “He had an instinctive understanding of England, and English customs, rooted in provincial soil”: Why we should remember the work of J.B. Priestley. | New Statesman
• “‘Kill your darlings’… feels like it comes from the past; when we were supposed to distrust idiosyncrasy.” Elizabeth McCracken and Sabrina Orah Mark in conversation. | The Believer
• “I think Edward is probably the most literary person with carpentry experience since Jesus Christ.” Meet the literary agent who represents famous writers and also builds them bookshelves. | T Magazine

Also on Lit Hub: Brad Phillips on Otherppl • Six novels that define the carnival genre • “Captivity,” a poem by Paige Ackerson-Kiely • Read from One Another