Lit Hub Daily: May 20, 2021

• “We imagine nations out of nonexistent lines and reinforce the lines with violence lest they cease to exist altogether.” Suchitra Vijayan on the human casualties of arbitrary borders. | Lit Hub

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• How does a book get adapted for TV and film? Laura Van Den Berg, Daniel Torday, and Melissa Scholes Young chime in on the process. | Lit Hub

• David Weill on the surprise of discovering, after a decade of performing lung transplants, that he’d also become a writer. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Mike Bond recommends 11 books for understanding the turbulent, anti-war, LSD-loving 60s. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Mystic inklings or business savvy? How Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, shaped her own destiny. | Lit Hub 

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• “Like me, my book will disappear. If I’m lucky, it will shine a little before it disappears.” Claire Cox reflects on virtually launching her debut novel after a year full of loss. | Lit Hub

• Phoebe Wynne considers her first introduction to Antigone—framed as “an insolent, disobedient girl”—and how ancient tales have become a rallying cry for modern women. | Lit Hub

• Here are 10 translated books from Haiti to read now. | Words Without Borders

• Devoney Looser explores the Austen family’s “complex entanglements” with colonial slavery, from known complicity to anti-slavery activism. | Times Literary Supplement

• “What was alternative without bitterness, pasty complexions, hatred of the contemporary, feelings of ostracization, moping?” Jeremy Atherton Lin on Morrissey and the cult of the wounded white male. | The Yale Review

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• How PERIPLUS collective is demystifying and democratizing the world of writing and publishing for BIPOC writers. | Poets & Writers

• A conversation on “guilty pleasures” in academia, from “the iconic texts of bad heterosexuality” to “rich white people fictions.” | LARB

• How Lois Lew mastered IBM’s 5,400-character(!) typewriter. | Fast Company

• “I feel very blessed to have grown up in a community and in a family where the idea of making art was normal and accepted.” Eve Ewing talks about finding her writing community, the pathways to art, and Black girls in STEM. | Catapult

Also on Lit Hub: Samantha Silva gets some writing help from an astrologer • Nick Ripatrazone on the renowned poet W.S. Merwin and the wilderness he loved • Read from Faysal Khartash’s newly translated novel, Roundabout of Death (trans. Max Weiss)