Lit Hub Daily: June 13, 2022

• Ariella Garmaise on Elif Batuman, Sheila Heti, and literature’s pervasive motherhood/creativity divide. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Playing chess with Humphrey Bogart, gossiping with W. Somerset Maugham… just another day for Art Buchwald in Paris. | Lit Hub Biography
• Ada Calhoun does a deep-reading of Ouida, the most famous lady novelist you’ve never heard of. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “I’m comforted as I write this review by the fact that movie and book both are about the worthlessness of reviewers.” Drew Johnson considers Lost Illusions (the book, 1843) and Lost Illusions (the movie, 2021). | Lit Hub Film & TV
• What Elisabeth Houston is reading now and next, from The Gentrification of the Mind to In the Wake. | Lit Hub Annotated Nightstand
• Lisa Brahin reflects on delving into memories that her grandmother, a refugee from anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine, would rather forget. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “Lost in the woods (or at sea, or in a blizzard), is now a kind of boogie man—an existential dread of something we are as likely to experience as getting hit by lightning.” Hal Niedzviecki on how to get lost (and why). | Lit Hub Craft & Advice
• Putin, Dostoevsky, and a Dallas Bookstore: Lori Feathers on The Brothers Karamazov and the war in Ukraine. | Book Marks
• “One wonders why a skinny, rebarbative marionette should be getting so much attention.” Joan Acocella on the many lives of Pinocchio. | The New Yorker
• Francine Prose, Marlowe Granados, and more writers muse on Joan Didion’s literary legacy. | Document
• “Writing and whoring—selling a body or a body of work—what’s the difference?” Andrea Werhun and Nicole Bazuin on literature and sex work. | Hazlitt
• A cognitive psychologist explains why we forget books we read. | The Guardian
• “I have just as many facets as my straight counterparts, even though fiction and fantasy don’t always show it.” V.E. Schwab on writing queer characters into the narrative. | Esquire
• More Miss Marple, anyone? It looks like we’re in an Agatha Christie renaissance. | Wall Street Journal
• From Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille to Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, David Santos Donaldson recommends seven novels about the queer immigrant experience. | Electric Lit

Also on Lit Hub: Anwen Crawford on art and acts of resistance • A poem by Stephen Dunn, from the late poet’s new collection • Read an excerpt from Merch Table Blues