Lit Hub Daily: May 9, 2022

TODAY: In 1968, queer poet, playwright, and novelist Mercedes de Acosta dies at 75.    

• Why Colin Barrett lets his characters talk a little shite. | Lit Hub Craft

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• “I used to tackle writers’ block by concentrating on the sad, pleading, and utterly perplexed faces of my starving children. Now that they are grown I don’t seem to get it.” Patrick McCabe takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub

• How Sylvia Sleigh upended portraiture’s gender imbalance. | Lit Hub Art

• Behind the scenes of Andy Warhol’s West Coast coming-out party, hosted by Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward. | Lit Hub Biography

• “Fetishizing women writers before promptly forgetting them is an American tradition that has cost us the legacy of more than one talented woman writer.” Reclaiming Pamela Moore from the sisterhood of sad literary girls. | Lit Hub

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• How Ten Percent, the new (delightfully awkward) British version of Call My Agent!, turns celebrity into text. | Lit Hub TV

• Dave Eggers is offering to replace copies of five books that a South Dakota school district is planning to destroy. | The Guardian

• Lizz Huerta talks about her literary education from audiobooks, working on construction sites, and elsewhere. | Washington Post

• “Has anyone made—are we capable of making—a John Brown who, in passionate interaction with his moment, makes our era and makes us?” Willis McCumber surveys the literature of John Brown. | The Baffler

• Tom Johnson explores the “subtly momentous cultural change” spurred by the arrival of paper in England. | London Review of Books

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• Inside the expansive, intimate world of audiobooks. | The Globe and Mail

• “MTV Books chronicled all manner of suffering in the early aughts, most of it cruel and undeserved. It was also the suffering of the systemically blessed.” Rachel Vorona Cote traces the life, death, and rebirth of MTV Books. | Hazlitt

Also on Lit Hub: Emily Bingham on the racist history of a beloved American song • Scenes from Laurie Stone’s home movies • Read from Georgi Gospodinov’s newly translated novel, Time Shelter (tr. Angela Rodel)

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