Lit Hub Daily: May 17, 2021

• In an era of endless Zillow scrolling, Nora Caplan-Bricker considers the novels of Tana French, “in which the lust for property is always primary to the plot, and always somehow morally deforming.” | Lit Hub Criticism

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• “A cliché is just a metaphor that’s been destroyed by its own success.” Edward St. Aubyn in conversation with Merlin Sheldrake. | Lit Hub

• Your week in virtual book events, featuring K-Ming Chang, Lydia Millet, and Rachel Kushner. | Lit Hub

• Grieving with Seneca: Nancy Sherman on what the stoics can teach us about grief. | Lit Hub Philosophy

• Brenda Peynado makes a case for fabulism as the new sincerity: “It’s truth-telling in a world that won’t believe us.” | Lit Hub

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• “Dissent has started to appear to me as a series of slow, uncoiling choices, inexorable change.” Jen Silverman on learning to make a scene. | Lit Hub

• How Meg Bashwiner and Joseph Fink wrote a joint memoir… without getting divorced. | Lit Hub

• Twelfth Night, Paradise, War and Peace, and more rapid-fire book recs from Alice Miller. | Book Marks

• Exorcising ghosts: J. Nicole Jones considers local legends, family folklore, and the “alluring and otherworldly” atmosphere of the South. | The Rumpus

• “A journey from and through hell takes the most pleasure in the proximity of a duo who mean no harm.” Blair McClendon on Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of The Underground Railroad. | 4Columns

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• “Did I need to train like a superhero just to be a person in America? Maybe.” Alexander Chee recalls his father’s lessons in self-defense. | GQ

• Colson Whitehead and Margaret Atwood discuss the challenges and possibilities of adaptation. | Time

• “It is a quirk of literary history that the cutting edge of twenty-first-century Anglophone literary fiction looks so very similar to the shishōsetsu of early twentieth-century Japan.” On Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel and the Japanese tradition of autofiction. | Boston Review

• “This is a novel about the dark side of ambition.” Joy Lanzendorfer breaks down the problem with the “California dream”  and its effect on her work. | Alta

• When Laurin Mayeno’s children’s book about gender diversity was banned in her area, she began an initiative to get it to as many kids as possible. | HuffPost

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Also on Lit Hub: Poetic letters across a pandemic distance, from Emma Kushnirsky and Robin Messing of Girls Write Now • A bet between two astronauts to see who gets to space first • Read from Lina Meruane’s newly translated novel, Nervous System (trans. Megan McDowell)