Lit Hub Daily: February 4, 2020

• Jane Austen, gritty educational reformer of the working class: Janine Barchas on how the proliferation of penny editions brought literature to the masses. | Lit Hub
• Dahlia Lithwick and Moira Donegan on Brett Kavanaugh, “male law,” and what happens when women tell the truth. | Lit Hub
• “The act of piecing ourselves together, through each other, shows up again and again in lesbian literature.” Sarah Heying on Carson McCullers and “The Sappho Question.” | Lit Hub
• “OK, first of all, Ripley is a loser.” Enjoy the 25 best bad Amazon reviews of The Talented Mr. Ripley. | Lit Hub
• In repudiating the Lost Cause, was “The Burning” the hardest story for Eudora Welty to write? | Lit Hub
• “The consumerist logic that underwrites much of our contemporary sexual culture is profoundly dehumanizing.” How capitalism has distorted desire in the #MeToo era. | Lit Hub
• Film scholar Sam Wasson on the true crimes and Los Angeles detective fiction that inspired the making of Chinatown. | CrimeReads
• Tola Rotimi Abraham recommends five brilliant African novels with strong female characters, from NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. | Book Marks
• “I’m trying to remind myself, anytime I enter a space, that I’m supposed to be there.” Tomi Adeyemi, Akwaeke Emezi, Elizabeth Acevedo, Angie Thomas, and Nic Stone discuss the future of YA. | Elle
• Consider the “pants”: on the social relativity of swear words. | JSTOR
• Janelle Monáe describes what Afrofuturism looks like: “It’s Lil Uzi Vert being happy with orange locs, Erykah Badu doulaing, Octavia Butler’s voice, Stacey Abrams being president and punching Trump out the Oval seat.” | The Cut
• Stephen King has quit Facebook, citing the “flood of false information allowed in its political advertising.” | The Guardian
• “Through her relationships with other women, I can trace the evidence of Carson’s becoming, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a writer.” Jenn Shapland on researching Carson McCullers. | The Paris Review
• Jericho Brown talks growing up in the South, coming out, and wandering around in underwear at 4 in the morning, writing poetry. | Garden & Gun
• George Steiner, the literary critic and polymath who reviewed books at The New Yorker for three decades, died at 90. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: What happens when you treat writing like acting? • “Something of the Sky”: A poem from Christian Wiman’s latest collection, Survival is a Style • Read a story from Lidia Yuknavitch’s new collection, Verge.