Lit Hub Daily: June 3, 2019

• Adventures in the foreign service: on Pablo Neruda’s life as a struggling poet in Sri Lanka. | Lit Hub
• Dilbert, Penn Station, and the Amazon Marketplace are just a few of the Kafkaesque things on this Kafkaesque list of Kafkaesque things. | Lit Hub
• What it’s like to teach writing when everyone’s a writer: Janet Burroway revisits her classic text for writing students. | Lit Hub
• Ready your TBR piles: these are the books Lit Hub contributors are most looking forward to in June. | Lit Hub
• “I wrote China Dream out of rage against the false utopias that have enslaved and infantilized China since 1949.” Ma Jian on the short path from utopia to dystopia. | Lit Hub
• “You will be a skeleton balanced on a razor blade.” Philippe Petit meditates on a life walking the high wire. | Lit Hub
• Paul French and Crime and the City visit Oxford, where nearly half the student body graduates to writing crime fiction, judging by the number of mysteries set in the university town. | CrimeReads
• The kids are all right (at spelling): the National Spelling Bee had to crown 8 co-champions when it ran out of words hard enough for these genius teens. | The New York Times
• The finalists for the 2019 Firecracker Awards for independently- and self-published books as well as literary magazines, have been announced. | CLMP
• “If you had told me in college that I would have written two books by now, I wouldn’t have believed it.” Nicole Dennis Benn talks writing, love, and finding her true home. | Vulture
• Turkish prosecutors are investigating novelists—including Elif Shafak—who have written about sexual harassment and violence, for “child abuse and inciting criminal acts” with their fiction. | The Guardian
• Is Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade the next Stoner? Alix Ohlin on the “inadvertent feminist classic” that could be the best book you’ve never read. | Publishers Weekly
• Rudolfo Anaya, Ana Castillo, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and more—Rigoberto González on the literary delights of New Mexico. | The Los Angeles Times
• A reading list inspired by Fleabag, to hold you over until Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s James Bond movie comes out. | Bustle

Also on Lit Hub: New York in the 1930s, as seen through Berenice Abbott’s lens • Read a poem from Devin Johnston’s collection Mosses and Lichens • An excerpt from Nicole Dennis-Benn’s new novel Patsy.