Lit Hub Daily: May 13, 2022

• “The issue is that their emotional lives have everything they need to be interesting, and yet they fall short of seeming interesting on screen.” Nylah Burton reviews the new adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. | Lit Hub Film & TV

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• How can we understand poet John Ashbery, who “lives not only in the world, he seems to live by all conceptions of it simultaneously”? | Lit Hub Criticism

• “The teenagers in the videos are living in a noir, but fighting to exist in another genre.” Lev AC Rosen sounds off against the banning of queer books (including his own). | Lit Hub

• Paul Craddock reveals the horrors and lore of early dentistry, from cross-species transplants to the dreadful “tooth worm.” | Lit Hub History

• John Higgins on what we mean when we call William Blake’s artwork “visionary.” | Lit Hub Art

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• Chloe Maxmin considers the complicated climate politics of rural America, and why she decided to run for Senate to address them. | Lit Hub Climate Change

• In praise of boredom, a gateway to creativity. | Lit Hub

• Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais, Mick Herron’s Bad Actors, Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen, and Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Which international thriller should you binge this weekend? Dwyer Murphy has some ideas. | CrimeReads

• Jokha Alharthi and her translator Marilyn Booth discuss the process of translating Bitter Orange Tree from Arabic to English. | Electric Literature

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• “The function of good art—and by extension criticism practiced as an art—is to render its audience unfit to serve as an extraction site for the cultural killing machine.” Ryan Ruby on Gary Indiana’s Fire Season. | New Left Review

• Lidija Haas considers Happening, the new film adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s 2000 memoir. | The New Republic

• “How quickly I had stopped treating my body like a terrible secret.” Melissa Febos on the feminist case for breast reduction. | The New York Times Magazine

• Kenny Stancil talks to librarians about book bans around the country. | Salon

• J.R. Nelson and Matt Revers talk about curating books and creating community at Myopic Books. | Block Club Chicago

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• As conservative parents push for book bans in schools, they’re also aiming at digital programs and e-readers in school libraries. | NBC News

Also on Lit Hub: Ada Limón on how to write a poetry collection • Philip Freeman on what we can learn from the Poetics • Read a story from Frederic Tuten’s latest collection, The Bar at Twilight