Lit Hub Daily: May 17, 2021

TODAY: In 1824, the publisher John Murray, together with five of Lord Byron’s friends and executors, decides to destroy the manuscript of Byron’s memoirs (which he has been given to publish) because he considers the scandalous details would damage Byron’s reputation. Opposed only by Thomas Moore, the two volumes of memoirs are dismembered and burned in the fireplace at the publisher’s London office.

• 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)

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