Lit Hub Daily: March 28, 2019

• “Joy Williams has been paying attention for a long time. And her anger is eloquent.” Amy Hempel on Williams’ ecological call to arms, Ill Nature. | Lit Hub
• “If users click on it, it must be what they want.” Clive Thompson on how the algorithm rewards extremism. | Lit Hub
• Astrological book recommendations for April (because literature is never in retrograde). | Lit Hub
• “Do you live for you, or for the monster that writes?” Pola Oloixarac on the un-Googleable lightness of being. | Lit Hub
• Anatomy of a perfect album: on Joni Mitchell’s Blue. | Lit Hub
• “The story connecting humans to potatoes is a tale of violence as well as sustenance.” A brief history of the noble tuber. | Lit Hub
• Dear reader: five recommended epistolary novels, from The Sympathizer to Possession. | Lit Hub
• Was the International Peace Mission Movement a religious cult, a force for civil rights, or both? | Lit Hub
• “It is…uncanny how closely the anxieties of the Gilded Age mirror our own.” Cara Robertson on our enduring fascination with the trial of Lizzie Borden. | CrimeReads
• 10 Great Baseball Books for Opening Day: from The Natural to Moneyball. | Book Marks
• Bret Easton Ellis’ needy essays, Amy Hempel’s experimental stories, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Harlan Coben’s Run Away: one of the year’s best suspense thrillers OR more cartoonish than compelling? | Book Marks
• “I have a more or less irresistible passion for books”: When Vincent van Gogh wasn’t painting, he was known to be a voracious reader, enjoying the work of authors like George Eliot, Tolstoy and Hans Christian Andersen. | The Economist
• Rejoice: Viola Davis is adapting Octavia Butler’s novel Wild Seed as a series for Amazon—and it’s going to be co-written by Nnedi Okorafor and director Wanuri Kahiu. | Deadline
• “When it comes to beauty, nature gave us a lot but not everything. As for the rest, you can steal it.” Read Namwali Serpell’s ode to her sister. | BuzzFeed News
• “The Universal is the goal of jokes.” On Pinsky, punchlines, and poetry. | Slate
• “Who’s afraid of Glenda Jackson? Most people, and with some cause.” Parul Sehgal profiles the woman playing King Lear at the Old Vic. | The New York Times Magazine
• “Why should an art form as innovative as fiction have a single archetype at all?” Jane Alison on story structures beyond the narrative arc. | The Paris Review
• Pinch of Nom, a cookbook of “slimming recipes” by Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone, has become the fastest-selling non-fiction book ever recorded, selling more than 200,000 copies in three days. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: At a dinner inspired by Marlon James’ latest novel • Five books you should listen to this spring • Read from A Change of Time