Lit Hub Daily: March 6, 2020

• Corn, coke, and convenience: Hope Jahren on how high-fructose corn syrup became an American staple. | Lit Hub Food
• “Is it possible to attend AWP if you’re poor?” Alison Stine on the problem of money and access at America’s largest writers’ conference. | Lit Hub
• David Nott on working to save lives in Aleppo’s secret hospitals during the Syrian Civil War, under a regime that targeted the most vulnerable. | Lit Hub Politics
• Before Antifa, there was the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee: Robin D.G. Kelley on the roots of anti-racist, anti-fascist resistance in the US. | Lit Hub History
• “A cautious estimate for my current common era: approximately 3,472 days of migraine, which is 83,328 hours.” Lisa Olstein on life with chronic pain. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “Atlantic City is nothing if not a town with a perpetual ability to reinvent itself.” Caitlin Mullen traces the rise and fall of a resort town reinvented as a gambling den. | CrimeReads
• New titles from Hilary Mantel, Anne Enright, James McBride, Louise Erdrich, and Lily King all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• From Orlando to A Clockwork Orange to The Handmaid’s Tale: the books that have inspired fashion designers and their collections. | Dazed
• Taika Waititi will write, direct, and produce two animated series based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—one set in the world of the book, and one which builds out the world of the Oompa-Loompas. | Vanity Fair
• Daryl Pinckney on Thomas Chatterton Williams’ new memoir and his dream of a “new global ‘white-beige’ elite.” | The New York Review of Books
• A newly found postcard that D.H. Lawrence sent to a lover in 1910 is being auctioned. | Nottingham Post
• “Thanks to Pasternak Slater’s choices, reading the novel becomes a pleasure.” On Nicolas Pasternak Slater’s new translation of his uncle’s novel, Dr. Zhivago. | LARB
• Jessi Jezewska Stevens writes an ode to rooftops, “a haven for mischief.” | The Paris Review
• Dean Koontz did not predict the spread of Covid-19. Why did the conspiracy theory take hold, and what does that tell us about the way we tell stories about disease? | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: “Moon Song”: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s poem in a new UNICEF anthology • How can Palestinian writers resist consumption by colonial narratives? • Read an excerpt from Ken Liu’s new collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.