Lit Hub Daily: March 27, 2017

• Why literature and pop culture just don’t quite get the complexity of the Midwest. | Literary Hub
• How a person should be: life advice from the great Adrienne Rich. | Literary Hub
• On the dark side of Amsterdam: Paul French explores the world’s great cities through crime fiction. | Literary Hub
• To stop a heart and start a brain: on performing rare, cutting-edge brain surgery. | Literary Hub
• “I think there are a few reasons that the lives of that generation of American Jews have formed my fiction.” Michael Chabon reflects on his writing and nostalgia after speaking with an 100-year-old fan. | The New Yorker
• “How did three such relatively sheltered women, the daughters of a priest living in rural Yorkshire, write some of the most passionate and proto-feminist novels of the 19th century?” On Sally Wainwright’s dramatization of the lives of the Brontë sisters. | The Atlantic
• Belle Boggs and Mike Scalise discuss finding a way to love again after a book project has been shelved, the gendered perceptions of illness (and illness memoirs), and rereading old writing. | BOMB Magazine
• Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek has written a Trump-inspired play, which will “be an attack on the Trump aesthetic: the gold, the plush furniture.” | The New York Times
• On the politically infused and often censored canon of Russian novels and Lenin’s literary leanings. | The Guardian
• “I think the true definition of freedom for anyone in the city is being able to move through it neutrally, if they so desire.” An interview with Lauren Elkin. | The Brooklyn Quarterly
• Patti Smith has purchased the reconstructed home of beloved French poet Arthur Rimbaud. | Architectural Digest

Also on Lit Hub: Ten Slovak women writers we’d like to see in English · Greg Iles in praise of Larry McMurtry · From Caitriona Lally’s new novel, Eggshells.