Lit Hub Daily: May 13, 2019

• What if you did… nothing? Maddie Crum on the rise of self-help books that encourage not much of anything! |Lit Hub
• “The real transformation lies not with the return of a single neglected voice, but with a chorus.” Joanna Scutts on how we find—and lose—women writers. | Lit Hub
• Anne Valente wonders why it’s so hard to write music into fiction. | Lit Hub
• New poetry by Carl Phillips from Wild Is the Wind. | LitHub
• How do we define animal abuse? A close look at the NYPD officers who look out for our pets. | Lit Hub
• “There are certainly parallels between the woman suffrage campaign and mountaineering.” On the 1909 National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in Seattle. | Lit Hub
• This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians: OlaRonke Akinmowo on Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the Free Black Women’s Library. | Book Marks
• Tobias Carroll on Oakley Hall, literary godfather of California, whose westerns and crime novels inspired devotion from such figures as Thomas Pynchon and Amy Tan. | CrimeReads
• Today in brilliant casting moves: Kristin Scott Thomas will play Mrs. Danvers in Netflix’s new adaptation of Rebecca. | Deadline
• “When reading a novel, watching a TV program or visiting an exhibition, a part of my mind would be constantly alert for, and quietly fashioning, tweetable material.” Mark Haddon on why he fell out of love with Twitter. | Financial Times
• Are anti-diet books the new diet books? | VICE
• Nine books that get at the “complexity, trauma, and triumph” of trying to conceive in the face of infertility. | BuzzFeed
• Kenneth Branagh finally stars as the Bard himself in All Is True, but can a biographical film about Shakespeare work when so few details are known about the playwright’s life? | The Atlantic
• A former director of Stanford University Press explains the origins of the publishing house’s funding crisis—suggesting a struggle between humanists and university administration that goes back 30 years. | The Chronicle of Higher Education
• “[T]his isn’t an aberration but is a really abhorrent continuance”: On the radical “Resistance Lit” of Natasha Lennard and Astra Taylor. | Vogue

Also on Lit Hub: A brief history of queer language before queer identity • Five reasons a writer should move to Jackson, MS • Read from Kathleen Alcott’s new novel, America Was Hard to Find