Lit Hub Daily: May 4, 2021

• It’s a war, a war of punctuation marks; these famous writers are—perhaps unsurprisingly—willing to die on these comma-ridden hills! | Lit Hub

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• Happy New Books Tuesday, from these 23 releases that are begging to be read by you. | The Hub

• “Gathering observations and making a story out of them is not a bad description of what doctors—and writers—do.” Suzanne Coven talks to Leslie Jamison about writing through the practice of medicine. | Lit Hub

• Stacey Swann on her 15-year writing process, and how John Steinbeck’s diaries got her through the biggest slump. | Lit Hub

• Chiara Marletto looks beyond our traditional conception of physics to counterfactuals, which tell us not what is, but what could be. | Lit Hub Science

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• “It changes it from an entertaining satire about grubbing minor poets into a truly great story about thwarted friendship and human loneliness.” How a Robert Bolaño story influenced Chris Powers’ new novel. | Lit Hub

• How John Coltrane’s interest in spirituality—inspired by Malcolm X—led him to create al­ternative notions of black masculinity in jazz. | Lit Hub Music

• Elizabeth Ellen talks to Walker Caplan about running a small press, writing autofiction, and reading the uncomfortable. | Lit Hub

• The Little Prince, The Fire Next Time, Becoming, and more rapid-fire book recs from Officer Clemmons. | Book Marks

• “If you’re going to be a writer, you have to be a reader. There is no better way to learn.” Linwood Barclay talks craft and crime with Otto Penzler. | CrimeReads 

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• “Making the jump from a niche feminist genre to the mainstream spotlight can be jarring and unpredictable.” What happens as #MeToo memoirs are marketed to a wider audience? | Harper’s BAZAAR

• Judith Butler reads Kafka’s Lost Writings, and considers “the distorted representations made in his name.” |  Jewish Currents

• Listen to this podcast with Rebecca Caroll, wherein she talks about her memoir, Surviving the White Gaze. | Tell Me About Your Father

• Ali Smith reflects on her “time-sensitive experiment” of writing to the calendar with her seasonal quartet. | The Guardian 

• “These adjunct novels are versions of the bildungsroman, the novel of education—but here education means learning just how precarious your future is.” On the rise of “adjunct lit,” and generative rage. | The Nation

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• Reading 14th-century stories can help reveal “how we turn trauma into memory, narrative—and, perhaps, transformation.” | LARB

• An ode to Libby, the library app where “it’s easy to get carried away.” | Engadget

Also on Lit Hub: Danielle Dreilinger on the college courses for curbing divorce • Julian Sancton considers the Belgica expedition, led by antihero Frederick Albert Cook • Read from Joan Silber’s latest novel, Secrets of Happiness