Lit Hub Daily: February 21, 2020

• Does the lost lyric poetry of Amelia Earhart offer clues to the pilot’s “private obsessions with love and death”? | Lit Hub
• “If self-help books soothe people whose lives feel like open wounds, there’s perhaps no class of people who needs the category more than writers do.” Chelsea Leu on the seductions and limitations of a billion-dollar genre. | Lit Hub
• “Being a poet means committing to vulnerability.” A conversation with Danez Smith. | Lit Hub
• “Julie is the new girl at somber, silent Manderley High.” Suggestions for new high school rom-com adaptations of literary classics. | Lit Hub Film
• Stephen Batchelor on the practice of ethical awareness, the process of “say[ing] ‘yes’ to your life as it manifests.” | Lit Hub
• “When my mother died, I died. But I am still here. How can that be?” Victoria Chang on the self and its many deaths. | Lit Hub
• New titles from Anna Burns, Brandon Taylor, and Julian Barnes all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• David Masciotra on Ford Fairlane, the punk rock private eye. | CrimeReads
• “In part, I love Portis because I feel less mean when I read him.” Wells Tower on the cult of Charles Portis. | The New Yorker
• Read about Lit & Luz, the ambitious annual festival bridging literary communities in Chicago and Mexico City. | Chicago Mag
• Victoria Coates, the former national security adviser who some suspect of writing The Warning, an anonymously authored exposé of the Trump administration, has been transferred to the Department of Energy. | The New York Times
• As Jane Austen adaptations show no signs of slowing, more readers are grappling with the novels’ colonialism and lack of diversity. | The Daily Beast
• What’s behind the proliferation of meaningless corporatized, scammy-sounding “garbage language”? | Vulture
• Twenty years after The Story of V, publishers are much more willing to print the word “vagina.” | The Guardian
• “We need to practice on something with lower stakes than the literal lives of accusers and accused.” How fiction can help us talk about the #MeToo movement. | Slate

Also on Lit Hub: Relearning to write after law school buried my voice • Finding humanity and humility in Alberto Giacometti • Read an excerpt from the second book of Lojze Kovačič’s autobiographical novel Newcomers (trans. Michael Biggins).