Lit Hub Daily: March 27, 2019

• Kick off your spring book-admiring with some of our favorite covers of March. | Lit Hub
• “What if I don’t even like writing. What if my true passion is praise?” On the allure (and trap) of validation. | Lit Hub
• “Can writing be taught? The answer is obviously yes.” | Lit Hub
• Phew: without Platonic dialectics, robots can’t really understand language (so we’re safe from a machine takeover. . . FOR NOW). | Lit Hub
• Meet Clare Winger Harris, the reclusive woman who became a pioneer of science fiction. | Lit Hub
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Lily Meyer on Goodbye, Columbus, Demi-Gods, and freelancing in the age of Twitter. | Book Marks
• Laura Griffin on researching forensic anthropologists, visiting the Body Ranch, and her favorite forensic fiction. | CrimeReads
• “For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and I think these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.” Andrea Long Chu on Ellis, White, and not taking the bait. | Bookforum
• Publishers are racing to print the Mueller Report in book form—or they will be, as soon as it’s made public. | Vox
• Opinion: the Swedish Academy should give the Nobel Prize in Literature to Dril. Well, it’s an opinion. | The Outline
• “We’ve met with or talked to probably every major official you would know who has departed or is thinking of departing the Trump White House.” On Javelin, the literary agency/Trump tell-all juggernaut. | The New York Times Magazine
• Road trip inspiration: here are the best bookstores in all 50 states. | Mental Floss
• After the managing director of the UK bookstore chain Waterstones said the company couldn’t afford to pay its staff a living wage, more than 1,300 authors signed an open letter in support of the workers. | The Guardian
• Gabriel Okara, the Nigerian poet and novelist considered by some to be the father of African modernism, has died at 97. | Okay Africa
• “I approach poetry as a sort of exercise in not only ventriloquism but in cohabitation.” Ezequiel Zaidenwerg on translating invented poets. | Words Without Borders

Also on Lit Hub: On But That’s Another Story Live: life-changing books • Eva Hagberg Fisher on allergies, vortices, and living in a tent on Otherppl • Reading Women meets Books on the Subway • On the daily rituals of Joan Didion, Patti Smith, and more • A poem by Toi Derricotte from her collection I  • Read from The Cook