Lit Hub Daily: March 20, 2018

• Jay Parini on the time he had a beer with Jorge Luis Borges in a Scottish pub and asked him, innocently: “Have you ever written a novel?” | Lit Hub
• Imagining Iraq: On the 15th anniversary of the Iraq War, Philip Metres offers a brief history of imperial dementia. | Lit Hub
• 11 classics we (not so) secretly hate. | Lit Hub
• From Julián Herbert’s English debut to Ted Scheinman’s nonfiction account of Austen-mania, 5 books making news this week. | Book Marks
• We attract the strange and bring out the crazy: A guide to Florida crime fiction. | CrimeReads
• It left readers swooning, drowning in the riptide of her language: Jill Lepore on Rachel Carson, poet of the sea. | The New Yorker
• “What conditions would allow more people to feel useful instead of feeling used?” Elaine Blair on what we can learn from the literature of sexual harassment, from Lightning Rods to Pamela. | Harper’s
• The myth of exceptionalism, gender asymmetries, and the big-tent quality of communal recovery: Chris Kraus interviews Leslie Jamison about her new book The Recovering. | The Paris Review
• “When our workaday vocabulary fails to represent awe and reverence and glory, only a dirty word will suffice.” On the history of profanity in poetry. | Poetry Foundation
• Miranda July, Curtis Sittenfeld, Allegra Goodman, and more: the shortlist for the 2018 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award has been announced. | The Sunday Times
• Capture this, please: Lynn Steger Strong on the anxieties and difficulties of trying to photograph life as it’s really lived. | Catapult
• A parable for our current age: In response to a picture book about Mike Pence’s rabbit, Marlon Bundo, John Oliver has released his own, which follows Marlon as he falls in love with a male rabbit (the proceeds of which will be donated to to organizations supporting LGBTQ communities). | NPR, Vulture

Also on Lit Hub: Sarah Viren on parenthood (and ghosts) • Genevieve Hudson’s search for literary community • New fiction by Tatyana Tolstaya: From her collection,Aetherial Worlds