Lit Hub Daily: March 15, 2019

TODAY: In 1918, literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce, is born. 

• Weekend reading: eight excellent debuts by Irish women writers (with a Sally Rooney bonus). | Lit Hub
• Read a previously unpublished letter from Zora Neale Hurston—novelist, reporter, folk concert curator, and true Renaissance woman. | Lit Hub
• Artist collectives, festivals, and an honest-to-goodness subculture: why Salt Lake City is a pretty great place for a writer to live. | Lit Hub
• “I spotted listings for Diane Keaton, John Gregory Dunne, and Joan Didion. If I got lonely, maybe I’d invite them over for drinks.” On crashing at Nora Ephron’s apartment. | Lit Hub
• The streets in Ulysses are the streets of the everyman: a walk through James Joyce’s Dublin. | Lit Hub
• Meet Eva Palmer Sikelianos, founding member of the literary subculture of “Sapphics” in the early 1900s. | Lit Hub
• “It’s more compelling to write about people more like you and me, people who are trying to do right but wrong still seems to find them.” Master of suspense Harlan Coben talks ordinary heroes and everyday inspiration. | CrimeReads
• 10 Great Irish Novels Not Set in Ireland: From The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. | Book Marks
• New titles from G. Willow Wilson, Salvatore Scibona, David Means, and Frans De Waal all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• “Despite all the optimism and goodwill that Obama embraces and inspires, I find Becoming troubling”: Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor on why Michelle Obama’s memoir is more political—and problematic—than we might think. | Boston Review
• The PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award will be awarded to three women writers and activists imprisoned for challenging male guardianship laws in Saudi Arabia. | PEN America
• “My desire to read about the casual cruelty of two women whose lives are linked by force and by circumstance was low.” On losing a friend while reading Elena Ferrante. | Jezebel
• Phones, wikis, music, and accessibility: how the internet is changing our ability to preserve endangered languages. | The Outline
• “Each one is so uniquely unintelligible that, in the end, it doesn’t even make sense to compare them.” A dispatch from the brave masochist who read 13 campaign memoirs from 2020’s candidates. | The Baffler
• “You know those things where it’s mean, but so mean that it’s hilarious? I was really good at that.” Read a profile of Lindy West. | The Cut
• Good news about bad books: Amazon will pull titles that promise to cure autism with—among other things—camel’s milk and chlorine dioxide. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: On the New Books Network, Isobel O’Hare and Andrea Blythe discuss erasure poems and rape culture • A conversation with Carley Moore, Lynn Melnick, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore • Lit Hub Recommends • Read from The Word for Woman Is Wilderness

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