Lit Hub Daily: February 18, 2020

• The romanticized Belle Epoque in Paris was an age of political crisis: Julian Barnes on a (different) age of fake news and “gangster imperialism.” | Lit Hub History
• “Your friends say The novelist, Brandon Taylor, and you want to die of shame.” When the short story writer (reluctantly) goes long. | Lit Hub
• Long coats, vests, and gender fluidity: Jenn Shapland catalogues the clothing of Carson McCullers. | Lit Hub
• “Woodstock Nation is a tract written to even the score by the guy who was thrown off the stage.” On the book that began as an acid-fueled speech. | Lit Hub History
• “Nonviolence requires a critique of what counts as reality.” Judith Butler on the case for nonviolence. | Lit Hub Politics
• “To grow up transgender in a bigoted household is to experience a radical disempowerment.” Veronica Esposito on moving beyond a misgendered childhood. | Lit Hub
• Joan Frank recommends five short novels that continue to shine, from Giovanni’s Room to Train Dreams. | Book Marks
• “The build, the crescendo, the ability to make a reader think that an essay is going one place but then goes another, delivering a wallop to the brain.” Why we should all be reading more Jenny Diski. | The Outline
• Since the 18th century, fan-fiction in the Anglophone world has given readers an opportunity to be socially (and sexually) experimental, including work inspired by Gulliver’s Travels and Pamela. | The Atlantic
• With same-sex relations still criminalized in most African countries, what role can queer fiction play in the continent today? | The Star
• “Romance (against romanticism) is what encapsulates Meaning a Life most for me.” Jeffrey Yang on Mary Oppen’s autobiography. | Poetry Foundation
• Elizabeth Wurtzel helped establish “a genre that borrows from the ugly past and looks to a radical future: the feminist disability memoir.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Everybody on the planet can write or draw or make a sculpture that responds to climate change; that act alone may make them feel less frozen—it may make them begin to march and protest and boycott and fight back.” Lauren Groff on climate change’s effect on art. | Ploughshares
• Despite the fact that Diana Gabaldon “hadn’t even set foot in Scotland” when she began writing the series, Outlander-specific tourism is booming there. | The Washington Post

Also on Lit Hub: 21 documentaries that redefined the genre • Inside Larry McMurtry’s home library • Read an excerpt from Aravind Adiga’s new novel Amnesty.