Lit Hub Daily: July 17, 2023

• “Overly sanitized stories mostly risk being forgettable.” For Janet Manley, grown-ups so very often miss the point of children’s books. | Lit Hub Criticism

• “art does not exist in a vacuum, so it is always funny to me when buds try to separate it from the context of the time and place.” Chuck Tingle takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

• Twenty years after Roberto Bolaño’s death, Aaron Shulman unpacks the extraordinary literary afterlife of the Chilean poet and novelist. | Lit Hub

• Well before Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, we nearly got an atomic bomb movie from… Ayn Rand. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• “I am driven to these desecrations out of artistic passion.” Lawrence Sutin on transforming books through erasure and collage. | Lit Hub

• “In one important time in history, monster also meant creative, experimental, and ever-changing.” Andrew Mangham explores how science and literature illuminated body difference in the 19th century. | The MIT Press Reader

• Read two poems by Rania Mamoun from her book Something Evergreen Called Life, translated from Arabic by Yasmin Seale. | The Dial

• Sarah Miller thinks maybe third time’s a charm for a novel that is more than just the occasional good moment. | The Real Sarah Miller

• “We don’t always know how to approach writing about the unspeakable. For me, it becomes a true writing challenge.” Annie Ernaux and Karin Schwerdtner in conversation (translated by Neil Smith). | The Walrus

• E. Tammy Kim profiles the poet Kim Hyesoon. | The New Yorker

• The man Pope Francis just appointed as the caretaker of doctrinal orthodoxy in the Catholic Church once wrote a book about… kissing? | ABC News

Also on Lit Hub: How familiarity influences our decisions • On the science of starling murmurations • Read an excerpt from Caleb Azumah Nelson’s latest novel, Small Worlds