Lit Hub Daily: March 18, 2019

• W.S. Merwin, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and translator, died Friday at 91. | Lit Hub
• “It hurts like hell, but it is not all finished in the West.” On reading Barry Lopez through a long Montana winter. | Lit Hub
• “The children never get the attention they deserve, because the Updike-like heroes need so much.” Thomas E. Ricks on life in an Updike novel. | Lit Hub
• Samuel Beckett really knew how to throw shade: from Frederic Pajak’s memoir, Uncertain Manifesto. | Lit Hub
• “Books I read ‘cause I’m addicted to literature.” The long tradition of literary allusions in hip-hop. | Lit Hub
• Meet the man brought to trial for “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” against the English language. | Lit Hub
• Xu Xi on money, guilt, and returning to Hong Kong to care for an aging parent. | Lit Hub
• The first reviews of John Updike’s “Rabbit” novels: from Rabbit, Run to Rabbit at Rest, and beyond. | Book Marks
• Sex, scandal, and swank: Guy Bolton’s guide to Los Angeles hotels in the Golden Age of mobsters and movie stars. | CrimeReads
• Read the first chapter of Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway. | BuzzFeed
• “Alex and Wendy believe in the algorithm.” Christian Lorentzen on the state of book criticism. | Harper’s
• “I’m speaking like I’m speaking for him too.” On the bittersweet afterlife of Ned Vizzini’s Be More Chill, five years after Ned Vizzini’s suicide. | The New York Times
• On the Mitford sisters, and their “story of aggressively nursed betrayals, both big and small… Imagine a Real Housewives franchise where half the cast goes Nazi.” | Jezebel
• This week, the National Book Critics Circle honored Arte Público Press, which has “made the Latino literary experience a reality for young Latina/o/x writers.” | NBC News
• The many problems with the Bad Sex in Fiction awards. | iai

Also on Lit Hub: Brian Gresko and Polly Rosenwaike talk writing and parenting • The British schoolboy memoir: masking misery with nostalgia • Read from Oksana, Behave!