Lit Hub Daily: January 19, 2018

• It was the worst of times: John Freeman on the reality TV president and our year in irreality · Aminatta Forna wonders what happens if you have an inauguration and nobody comes. | Literary Hub
• Alison Hart on how to write a #MeToo story. | Literary Hub
• “There are all sorts of caves, including ice caves, sea caves, volcanic caves, and glacier caves.” From Keats “Cave of Quietude” to the Tuckaleechee Caverns of Townsend, Tennessee, Susan Harlan goes deep. | Literary Hub
• On Philip K. Dick and Black Mirror: Does speculative fiction really work on TV? | Literary Hub
• “Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose.” Masha Gessen on her youth, her emigration, and the burden and valor of choice. | New York Review of Books
• “Her work is a free-floating mass of no determined orbit, with an irresistible gravitational pull.” How Anna Kavan reinvented herself, in fiction and in life. | Lapham’s Quarterly
• John Lithgow’s new one-man show has created a ravenous desire for W Somerset Maugham’s long out-of-print anthology Tellers of Tales—more people want copies than copies exist. | The Guardian
• “Some prison officials are determined to keep the people they lock in cages as ignorant as possible about the racial, social and political forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation on earth.” On the perpetual banning of The New Jim Crow (among other titles) in prisons. | The New York Times
• On The Internal Machine, an exhibition dedicated to everyone’s favorite “sculptural and use-value object[s]” (books). | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Reese Witherspoon, reigning queen of literary adaptations, is turning Curtis Sittenfeld’s forthcoming short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It into a television show, with Kristen Wiig to star. | Variety
• Two thieving nerds have stolen a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone worth £40,000 from an English bookstore along with a first edition of The Hobbit and Terry Pratchett’s Colour of Magic. | The Bookseller

Also on Lit Hub: On China’s for-profit version of Wikipedia · Remembering the unlikely success of Peter Mayle · Read from Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions.

· If you have a tip for Lit Hub Daily, send the link to daily@lithub.com ·