Lit Hub Daily: July 29, 2019

TODAY: In 1900, Henry Spencer Ashbee, notable Victorian pornography collector dies, leaving his entire collection to the British Museum with the condition that the erotic works had to be accepted along with the conventional items.

• Neither indestructible superheroes nor passionless victims: Stephanie Jimenez on learning to write girls with agency in fiction. | Lit Hub
• Eight paranormal books to read right now, from the uncanny to the just plain weird. | Lit Hub
• The love/hate story of the writer and the dictator: Alaa Al Aswany on Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Return of the Spirit and its influence on Egyptian politics. | Lit Hub
• “Even if its cultural roots are much deeper than this, our current disgust with fat has its most immediate conditions of possibility in the early 20th century.” On the evolution of fatness in society. | Lit Hub
• This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians: Alison Fraser talks tarot decks, poet-librarians, and Sylvia Beach the visionary archivist. | Book Marks
• Paul French takes a look at the long history of crime novels set in Buenos Aires and how Argentine authors are using noir to tell complex stories about today’s most pressing issues. | CrimeReads
• “I had a chilling thought: What if the scan revealed a surprise? What if, buried deep in the muscle of this 2,000-year-old man, we saw a bullet?” 13 thriller writers on the best murders they ever wrote. | The New York Times
• Is your novel in the weeds? Why not follow one of these plot-generating Twitter bots! | Electric Literature
• One of this year’s Booker Prize nominees—Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport—is just one (1,000-page) sentence long. | Quartz
• Trump told reporters there should be an investigation into Barack Obama’s book deal (possibly because he doesn’t believe books are real). | Slate
• Douglas Preston, president of the Authors Guild, on the recent surge in bookselling scams—counterfeiting, plagiarism, piracy and more. | The Los Angeles Times
• The city of Baltimore is feeling very proud of its native son Raymond Melbourne Weaver, whose 1921 biography of Herman Melville helped revive the Moby-Dick author from obscurity. | The Baltimore Sun
• Boris Johnson isn’t the only British politician to have also written fiction: a brief history, from Benjamin Disraeli to WInston Churchill. | The New European

Also on Lit Hub: Gerry Howard and Peter Kaldheim on a friendship borne of books • Mike Schneider remembers Tony Hoagland • Read from Wioletta Greg’s latest novel Accommodations (tr. Jennifer Croft).

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