Lit Hub Daily: March 8, 2017

TODAY: In 1890, Bram Stoker begins work on Dracula.

• Rebecca Solnit on silence, pornography, and feminist literature, from Virginia Woolf to Audre Lorde. | Literary Hub
• 10 books to read on International Women’s Day, while you’re on strike. | Literary Hub
• Read a short story from the first-ever collection of fiction smuggled out of North Korea. | Literary Hub
• Sharon Olds, brave poet of the body, talks with John Freeman about endless, early rejection (and more). | Literary Hub
• Finding a room of one’s own on the Mexico City metro’s women-only car. | Literary Hub
• Nothing breaks the spell cast by James Baldwin: Darryl Pinckney on Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro. | The New York Review of Books
• “While I hadn’t imagined we’d be where we are now, I guess I’m not surprised.” A profile of Mohsin Hamid. | The New York Times
• Larissa Pham on Eve’s Hollywood, which “feels like one very long brunch conversation with your glamorous older cousin the afternoon following a party she snuck you into.” | The Paris Review
• “Snakes, like the summer torpor, the insularity, and the bedrock racism, are presented as a regrettable, but inevitable fact of life in the South.” On the significance snakes assume in Joan Didion’s South and West. | Signature Reads
• Why write the inverse of a novel that was published 12 years earlier? On Domenico Starnone’s Ties, which “feels like a deliberate counterpoint” to Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. | The Week
• It’s worth remembering how much blood and sweat used to go into the distribution of the written word: The librarian of the Convent of the Recoleta on its history and 20,000 volumes. | The American Scholar
• Speaking with the “proprietresses” of The Ripped Bodice, “the only store in America that specializes in love stories.” | VICE

Also on Lit Hub: Alice Neel’s artist’s life: on the career of an American great · 11 women you should read (regardless of day or month or year)

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