Lit Hub Daily: May 17, 2019

• “Like its appeal, its applications are personal and often regional.” On Flannery O’Connor’s two deepest loves: mayonnaise and her mother. | Lit Hub
• “I still don’t know where Joy Division came from”: an oral history of an iconic band. | Lit Hub
• The ongoing exile of the undocumented: Oscar Villalon on The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez. | Lit Hub
• Today’s most delightful revelation is that L. Frank Baum’s first book was a manual for breeding fancy chickens. | Lit Hub
• Anger and art in a dying empire: Jonathan Jones on Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and British painting in the 1970s. | Lit Hub
• New titles from Karen Russell, Max Porter, and Kathleen Alcott all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Nathan Ward on the legendary gangs, outlaws, and cowboy detectives that made the Western the earliest “true crime” sensation. | CrimeReads
• On Catch-22, The Name of the Rose, Hot Zone, and the rise of the literary miniseries. | The Week
• A Leonora Carrington biopic based on Elena Poniatowska’s novel Leonora is headed our way. (!!!) | Screen Daily
• Hey guys: turns out growing up in a house full of books makes you smarter—even if you don’t read them. | Scientific American
• Haymarket Books and Annie Finch are raising money to publish Choice Words, “the first major literary anthology about abortion,” featuring work by Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Leslie Marmon Silko, and more. | Kickstarter
• British crime writers recommend 50 great thrillers by women, in response to a Sunday Times list of the 100 best thrillers published after 1945 (which included only 28 female authors). | The Guardian
• The Prix Monte-Cristo, a new literary prize in France, will be awarded to a French or Francophone author writing on the theme of confinement. The jury will consist of detainees in Europe’s largest prison. | BookRiot
• “We wanted to make a song about one of our favorite dystopian books, but we ended up inadvertently writing a non-fiction jam”: Nerdcore rappers MC Lars and Mega Ran have released a new track (and music video) inspired by 1984. | Nerdist

Also on Lit Hub: On The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan, Saskia Vogel talks Sex and feminism • On the New Books Network, Carrie Tippen and Nico Slate discuss Gandhi’s diet • Moving through New York’s early 20th-century gay spaces • A betrayed generation is rising up on climate change • Read an excerpt from Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon (tr. Aaron Robertson).