Lit Hub Daily: May 15, 2019
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1906, at the 1907 American Booksellers Association banquet, Gelett Burgess hands out copies of his new book Are You A Bromide? The book jacket features a photo of a woman—Miss Belinda Blurb—and a new role: blurbing, thus coining the promotional text on a book-jacket.
- “Could it be that masculinity itself is a violent ideology?” Lacy Johnson on Rachel Louise Snyder and the ways we name violence. | Lit Hub
- Stories, social consciousness, and CBD: Jane Ciabattari reports from the Bay Area Book Festival. | Lit Hub
- Some writing advice from Guy Gavriel Kay: whatever you do, don’t take any writing advice. | Lit Hub
- “Girl, Interrupted shows how, when done right, with passion and an eye for truth, the personal can be universal.” How Winona Ryder took Susanna Kaysen’s memoir from page to screen. | Lit Hub
- That’ll do, John Updike. Or, an accounting of which writers have won the most major awards. | Lit Hub
- On the link between Lyme disease and bioweapons: Kris Newby explores the murky history of government experiments with bug-borne illness. | Lit Hub
- “It’s a mistake to expect literature to come only from literary sources.” On translating Mario Levrero, the Kafka of Uruguay. | Lit Hub
- Lilly Dancyger on grief, trauma, and what it’s like to watch true crime as the relative of a murder victim. | CrimeReads
- This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Bradley Sides on the brilliance of Toni Morrison and Karen Russell. | Book Marks
- “It’s learning how to switch off that critical voice long enough to give yourself the time to play, to experiment, that I think is the key to making good work.” Jon Gray on designing the book covers for Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, J.D. Salinger, and other greats. | It’s Nice That
- “Although playful, Bullshitters are fundamentally earnest. I think of them as old epic poets, writers who sum up their culture in voices.” In praise of literary bullshitting, from Herman Melville to William Gaddis to Gayl Jones. | Full Stop
- “It’s hard to sell a utopian project when the first example that springs to everyone’s mind is Stalin’s Soviet Union”: Sandra Newman on the gradual poisoning of literary utopias. | The Guardian
- With its recent launch of a book division and expansion into machine learning (not to mention an endorsement from Margaret Atwood), does the entertainment site Wattpad mark a seachange in digital publishing trends?| The Globe and Mail
- On the literary collective that is translating 100 classic Indian novels into English. | Book Riot
- “[Q:] What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? [A:] Health insurance.” Xuan Juliana Wang (candidly) answers ten questions. | Poets & Writers
- Should we just give up on trying to define “camp”? | Slate
Also on Lit Hub: Reading Women talk biculturalism, The Mango Bride, and more • On Otherppl, Lydia Fitzpatrick on imagining her novel’s setting • Bruce Smith on poetry in prison and the poetic task of demystification • Inside San Francisco’s plague-ravaged Chinatown, c. 1900 • Read an excerpt from Max Porter’s new novel Lanny.
