Lit Hub Daily: February 4, 2019

• “My mother, who spent most of her life building work and family, never built a room of her own.” Marlon James on the difficulty of writing about his mother. | Lit Hub
• “The magic is this: you don’t know what happens in the story.” On the destabilizing brilliance of Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter.” | Lit Hub
• “Every time I sat down at the computer, it was Woolf’s language that went flitting through my mind.” Katharine Smyth on moving away from Virginia Woolf’s work to understand her own. | Lit Hub
• “Fine, God. If you’re going to throw this crap at me, I demand to be compensated.” Julie Yip-Williams on illness, faith, and family. | Lit Hub
• Patricia Highsmith’s Malcontents, Misogynists, and Murders: from Carol to Tom Ripley. | Book Marks
• Paul French looks at the history of crime novels set in Chinatowns around the world, from Sherlock Holmes’ Victorian-era explorations to the modern-day novels of Henry Chang and Ed Lin. | CrimeReads
• “To use woke as a buzzword or a sarcastic undercutting is to fail to recognize its power.” Kashana Cauley on the original meaning and history of the term—and its continued utility. | The Believer
• When an author cancels her own 3-book series, has YA twitter drama actually gone too far? | Vulture
• “Just as it is difficult to believe that a parent has gone, taking all those memories and parts of your life with them, so it is difficult to confront the books and papers that seem to embody that life.” On inheriting a lifetime’s collection of books. | Financial Times
• “American readers are quick to assume the guilty party is always them.” Read an interview with Dave Eggers about his forthcoming novel, The Parade. | McSweeney’s
• The city of Wellesley has agreed to rescind an order that poet and critic Dan Chiasson remove a large “Impeach Trump” banner from the front of his house. | The Boston Globe
• On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Marlon James speaks about his planned Dark Star Trilogy. | The New Yorker
• J.D. Salinger’s son confirmed that some of his father’s previously unseen material will eventually be published. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Peter Hedges in conversation with Will Schwalbe on But That’s Another Story • On Beirut, modernism’s vanished utopia • Read from The Man Who Couldn’t Die