Lit Hub Daily: May 7, 2018

• Rumaan Alam doesn’t believe in writer’s block (but does believe in Joanna Newsom). | Literary Hub
• Mother’s Day is coming: Brazos Bookstore recommends 9 unexpected maternal-adjacent books. | Literary Hub
• Writers of the Zodiac: Meet some revolutionary Taureans, from Marx to Malcolm X. | Literary Hub
• When a YA writer reinvents herself: Francesca Lia Block is so much more than Weetzie Bat. | Literary Hub
• From McCarthy to Bolaño, 9 of the most violent works of literature (in case you weren’t feeling dark enough already). | Literary Hub
• Looking back at the first reviews for each of Toni Morrison’s 11 novels. | Book Marks
• From gothic suspense to globetrotting spies, 9 debut crime novels to discover this spring. | CrimeReads
• “Prison seems to be broadly about sacrifice, rather than about rehabilitation, and I haven’t really seen a paradigm for reform that convinces me.” An interview with Rachel Kushner. | Electric Literature
• What We Lose author Zinzi Clemmons has accused Junot Díaz of forcibly kissing her while she was a graduate student at Columbia, while writers Carmen Maria Machado and Monica Byrne alleged that he verbally abused them. | The New York Times
• “Once a woman enters a royal family, every aspect and function of her body becomes a site of proprietary fantasy.” Margo Jefferson on Meghan Markle. | The Guardian
• “In many cases, the confidence men have is not particularly warranted.” Why are so few letters to the editor written by women? | The Atlantic
• “By the age of twenty-four, [she] had arrived at a style at once taut and permissive, rebellious and disciplined, candid and cool.” Max Nelson on the filmmaker Chantal Akerman. | New York Review of Books
• Esther Kim on the literature of the Korean diaspora and three Korean modernists you should know. | Words Without Borders

Also on Literary Hub: Our April under-the-radar favorites • Mammoth hunting: In search of the great beast’s bones • Read a story from Robert Aickman’s collection Compulsory Games