Lit Hub Daily: July 26, 2019

• “Climate change consciousness did not begin with white or European writers or scientists.” Kim-Marie Walker gives an appraisal (and update) of Lit Hub’s Climate Change Library. | Lit Hub
• Why do we buy books and not read them? Karen Olsson on the ghosts on her shelves. | Lit Hub
• “It was Fight Club that showed me the Dream was a lie in the first place, and the people who shilled for it were all selling something.” Rebecca Renner on the anti-capitalist message of an unjustly vilified work. | Lit Hub
• Guess what? Gore Vidal wrote mystery novels under a pseudonym. That’s right. | CrimeReads
• New titles from Laura Lippman, Chuck Klosterman, Courtney Maum, and more all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Turns out the author of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a scholarly folklorist (which still doesn’t explain those nightmare-inducing illustrations). | JSTOR
• In which we learn that Javier Marias organizes his books “in strict chronological order” by language or country. Makes sense, honestly. | The New York Times
• Prepare ye well, Joyce Carol Oates stans—the master short story writer will be teaching a MasterClass on the art of short form. | Yahoo Finance
• The Library of Congress is expanding its annual book festival with a yearlong event series that will include authors like Joy Harjo, Edwidge Danticat, Malcolm Gladwell and more.  | DCist
• Macmillan is limiting libraries’ access to its ebooks, claiming that ebook lending is “cannibalizing [their] digital sales.” | The Wall Street Journal
• “A loose cannon with a floppy fringe and a bicycle”: on Boris Johnson’s literary cameos. | The Guardian
• “The women in my family and the many hours of handiwork have done their best in trying to make me a whole woman as much as possible”: Mihaela Miroiu on the meaning of womanhood in communist Romania. | Asymptote

Also on Lit Hub: On The Literary Life, Pablo Cartaya talks to Mitchell Kaplan about heading to the heart of controversy, and more • On the New Books Network, Alexandra Popoff on Vasily Grossman and the individual in the Soviet Union • Michael Zantovsky on humor as an antidote to tyranny, on Keen On • A visual dive into the cultural history of the swimming pool • What Caliban tells us about gatekeeping and language • Read an excerpt from Pablo Medina’s new novel The Cuban Comedy.