Lit Hub Daily: May 1, 2018

TODAY: In 2009, Carol Ann Duffy is appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, the first woman appointed to the position.

• From John Shade to Carrie Bradshaw, 50 fictional writers, ranked (bonus Tom Selleck content). | Lit Hub
• Lucas Mann wonders: if reality TV is superficial, why does it make me feel so much? | Lit Hub
• Rumaan Alam, Sheila Heti, Helen DeWitt, and more: 14 books you should read this May. | Lit Hub
• Celebrate May Day with these 26 radical crime novels featuring activists, organizers, revolutionaries, and agitators. | CrimeReads
• “Ms. Kushner has long since burned down whatever resistance you might have toward her talent or her narrative.” A look back at the first reviews of The Flamethrowers. | Book Marks
• “[Her work] opens up a portal between the everyday and the sacred, between our finite lives and our long cultural and racial histories…” Zadie Smith on photographer Deanna Lawson. | The New Yorker
• “Joyce, Dos Passos, and Döblin fashioned not novels but eternal text-cities in which the reader may witness, wander, get lost.” Tyler Malone on the modernist city-novel. | Lapham’s Quarterly
• “How do I combine this writing and this art to say as much as I can with as few words as I can: I knew I wanted to do that.” Rumaan Alam profiles Maira Kalman. | The Cut
• “If this moment rested on a still-incomplete act of imagination, I wanted to learn what I could from the imagined-up worlds I’d encountered years earlier.” On feminist utopias, #MeToo, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. | The Point
• “I have to forget the text I’m translating exists.” 10 literary translators on what makes a work of translation great. | Scroll.in
• Min Jin Lee, Jamie Quatro, Rachel Lyons and more on envy, desire, and not asking for permission. | Lit Hub
• The night I slept in James Thurber’s bed: Annabelle Gurwitch explores the home of a literary legend. | Lit Hub
• “With diasporic intertexts in sound and footwork, hair movement—hairography—deserves due appreciation.” The highbrow take on Beyoncé’s hair you never knew you always needed. | The Paris Review
• Epiphany has announced the winners of its inaugural Breakout 8 Writers Prize. | Epiphany Magazine

Also on Literary Hub: You don’t have to be old to write a memoir: Steven Church argues against finding “clarity” · It all starts with a draft: Ross Raisin offers some tips on getting to the end of the beginning · New short fiction by Jen Silverman from her collection, The Island Dwellers.

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