Lit Hub Daily: March 13, 2019

• “To be a Southern writer is to live with variants of pain.” On teaching the Southern canon in the New South. | Lit Hub
• “How do you get any work done here?” The impossibility of finding a place to write in New York. | Lit Hub
• “As a queer writer and baseball fan, it is with gratitude that I read these obituaries.” Britni de la Cretaz on researching the hidden history of queer women in baseball. | Lit Hub
• When the eeriness of trauma can only be understood through fiction: on the healing buffer of “not exactly.” | Lit Hub
• Here are the 25 authors who’ve made the most money in the last decade (key takeaway: don’t come at James Patterson). | Lit Hub
• “I decided to write a novel about a chef because creative impulses don’t always make sense.” When writing turns into cooking boot camp. | Lit Hub
• From Whitman to the free Black community of Weeksville, a look at Brooklyn’s earliest, secret enclaves of queer life. | Lit Hub
• Charles Cumming on the history of writers becoming spies and spies becoming writers, from Graham Greene to Le Carré. | CrimeReads
• Savage classic reviews of your favorite red flag books: from Atlas Shrugged to American Psycho. | Book Marks
• “I do not want a Nancy Drew I can relate to. I want a Nancy Drew I can aspire to.” Joanna Greenberg is on the Case of the Perfect Girl Detective. | BLARB
• Not to be outdone by Lana Del Rey, Devendra Banhart will be publishing a collection of poetry, obviously entitled Weeping Gang Bliss Void Yab-Yum, in April. | Pitchfork
• “Somehow, in the midst of a horrifying ordeal, Le Guin finds an incredible sweetness.” Charlie Jane Anders reflects on The Left Hand of Darkness at 50. | The Paris Review
• Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia, received the E.B. White Award from the American Academy of Art and Letters for her life’s work. | Burlington Free Press
• “This is the joy of Prince — all of him.” Read Hanif Abdurraqib’s introduction to Prince: The Last Interview. | EW
• News that’s as unsurprising as it is terrible: Trump’s 2020 budget proposal threatens to defund libraries. | Book Riot
• “The coming of independence became a promise of better life to come for everybody”: Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, often thought of as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, has come out with a new short story collection. | NPR

Also on Lit Hub: On H.G. Adler’s lectures from a concentration camp • Thankfulness, praise, and Ross Gay • On Reading Women, T Kira Madden talks naming her book and owning her story •  Pam Houston on the beauty of the dying planet on Otherppl • Read from The Dragonfly Sea