Lit Hub Daily: May 8, 2019

• Because nothing is more entertaining than the lives of poets: sixteen poet biopics, ranked. | Lit Hub
• “What would perish if we could no longer tell stories? The word? The world?” Alexis Wright on the systemic weaponization of silence. | Lit Hub
• A brief history of political listicles: Douglas Brinkley on our love of ranking American presidents. | Lit Hub
• “These stories are hideously contemporary.”  Damian Barr moves from memoir to fiction and finds inspiration in a real life crime. | Lit Hub
• “Beef was a man’s domain.” On class, gender, and the weird dynamics of eating beef in America. | Lit Hub
• Existential dread and the art of boat-building: on fatherhood and large projects that make no sense. | Lit Hub
• “Wonderfully unpredictable events” and open secrets at the PEN World Voices Festival. | Lit Hub
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Rumaan Alam on Shirley Hazzard, Patrick Modiano, and the foolishness of fixed opinions. | Book Marks
• Casey Cep talks true crime, deep research, and following in Harper Lee’s footsteps. | CrimeReads
• “They trekked by horse-drawn buggy, with children clinging to their carriage, and bleating goats scurrying past”: Ratha Tep retraces Truman Capote and Jack Dunphy’s favorite Mediterranean locales, where some of Capote’s most famous works were written. | The New York Times
• “One book doesn’t have to represent everything about a culture. ” A profile of Amy Tan, 30 years after The Joy Luck Club’s publication. | EW
• Jamila Woods’ new album, LEGACY! LEGACY!, pays homage to different Black artists on each of its 13 tracks, including writers like Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Nikki Giovanni. | VICE
• “Let’s cut to the chase and just blame Mark Twain for everything. ” Or at the very least, the pervasive American cult of eternal adolescence. | The Baffler
• Peek inside Edmund de Waal’s library of exile at the 58th Venice Biennale. | Wallpaper
• Ann Patchett has written a picture book called Lambslide and its cover is cuter than it has any right to be. | Romper
• Read a profile of Samanta Schweblin, “the warm, smiling woman who can write so hauntingly about, among other things, teen girls eating live birds. ” | Vulture

Also on Lit Hub: On the Chinese American laborers who built the Transcontinental Railroad • On Reading Women, Emily Bell talks editing Lucia Berlin • Lilliam Rivera on writing teenage girls from the Bronx, on Otherppl • Kanako Nishi on writing gender, power, and the pain of others • Read from Chia-Chia Lin’s debut novel, The Unpassing.