Lit Hub Daily: May 5, 2017

TODAY: In 1857, publisher Moses Phillips hosts a dinner for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and other literary notables to agree the launch of The Atlantic Monthly, “a magazine of literature, art, and politics.”  

• Eva Dillon on her father’s secret life as a Cold War Spy. | Literary Hub
• Art can legitimate prejudice: reading Houellebecq’s Submission in the midst of the French elections. | Literary Hub
• Poverty is a matter of life and death: how inequality shortens lifespans. | Literary Hub
• Life sentences for questioning the history of a war: On censorship in Bangladesh. | Literary Hub
• From an investigation into mass incarceration to a family memoir, this week’s top-reviewed books. | Book Marks
• Paula Hawkins on private, raw ideas for books, literary trends, and her admiration of Margaret Atwood. | Longreads
• “It occurred to me that I was instead watching a seven-hour-long orgy of violence against women—promoted and marketed as high-minded, politically astute popular entertainment.” Is The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation Not Feminist? | NYRB
• The Boy Who Lived Forever will continue his global domination with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s Broadway debut next April. | The New York Times
• Life sentences for questioning the history of a war: on censorship in Bangladesh. | Literary Hub
• Jarett Kobek on the weirdly authoritarian impulse embedded in the Internet, the many tragedies of the teenage boy, and the (potential) artistry of video games. | The Millions
• A first look at the plans for Obama’s presidential library, which will be constructed in Chicago’s South Side. | BuzzFeed News
• How Mozart changed Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s mind about America’s most hated bird. | Literary Hub
• TV is now going completely off book: On American Gods, The Man in the High Castle, and other television adaptations that go beyond their source material. | The Guardian
• Idra Novey has won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and Jim Shepard has won The Rea Award for the Short Story (as well as the Literary Hub Award for Best Author Photo). | Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The Rea Award for the Short Story

And on Literary Hub: The week in literary film and TV news • On Mozart’s love of starlings, America’s most hated bird • In honor of the Kentucky Derby: fictional horses, ranked • An excerpt from Richard Russo’s Trajectory

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