Lit Hub Daily: May 9, 2019

• Is it still “punk” when the musician makes it big? Vivien Goldman on Patti Smith’s “Free Money.” | Lit Hub
• The paradoxes of prison rehabilitation: Rachel Louise Snyder on the struggle to learn nonviolence in a violent place. | Lit Hub
• How the Bubonic Plague almost came to America (featuring a pompous doctor, a racist bureaucracy, and more!) | Lit Hub
• “While I had looked for a lost poem I had found an entire language.” One German’s two-decade search for a poem she couldn’t quite name. | Lit Hub
• On illustrating the ideas of Walter Benjamin. | Lit Hub
• Balancing power in the Lebanese borderlands. | Lit Hub
• Michael Lewis on Harper Lee’s murderous reverend, Joyce Carol Oates on Ted Chiang’s humanist sci-fi, and more of the book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
• David Brooks’ The Second Mountain: genius synthesis of world-class thinkers OR foggy bait-and-switch. | Book Marks
• Hallie Rubenhold talks social history, true crime, and why it’s time to forget Jack the Ripper and focus on the stories of his victims. | CrimeReads
• Don’t feel bad about not reading—blame Mark Zuckerberg instead. After all, “he doesn’t want you to dive head first into literature; nobody ever broke off from reading War and Peace to impulse buy a new nest of saucepans.” | The Guardian
• Watch the first trailer for Damon Lindelof’s “reimagining” of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. | Deadline
• How did Sherwood Anderson’s fictional Midwestern town of Winesburg become “a cultural byword, a metaphor for the yawning emptiness of rural life”? | The New York Times
• Surrealistic, poignant vignettes – this seems to be the calling card not only of Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s BoJack Horseman, but his short fiction as well. | The Atlantic
• “Fitzgerald’s deployment of jazz imagery was as cutting-edge as it was conservative.” Gabrielle Bellot on what The Great Gatsby reveals about the Jazz Age. | JSTOR
• “I’m wondering what the present is asking of me.” Read an interview with Sheila Heti. | Guernica
• Behold, 19 great books from indie presses that you should read. | BuzzFeed News

Also on Lit Hub: On The Maris Review, Maris Kreizman talks to Erin Somers about her debut novel • The call of The Call of the Wild on Literary Disco • A library for the ragpickers of Bangalore • In memoriam: Stanley Plumly • Read an excerpt of Miriam Cohen’s story from the spring 2019 issue of Witness Magazine.