Lit Hub Daily: November 11, 2019

• “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole” and more essential advice from Kurt Vonnegut. | Lit Hub
• Deirdre Bair, biographer of record, recalls the difficulty of convincing Samuel Beckett of just about anything. | Lit Hub
• “Part of the patriarchal script is learning as a man, that one is above others.” Imran Siddiquee on Lindy West, and the problem with “new masculinity.” | Lit Hub Politics
• What was it like to be edited by Barack Obama? Speechwriter Adam Frankel on writing for a writerly president. | Lit Hub
• “We will never go back to the way it once was.” Jeffrey Rosen speaks with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the past, present, and future of abortion rights. | Lit Hub Politics
• “For him exile was not just a physical migration.” Azar Nafisi on finding herself in the writing of Vladimir Nabokov. | Lit Hub
• Learning to unsay the R-word: Amy Silverman on changing the way a culture speaks. | Lit Hub
• 15 of the Best Queer Debuts of 2019: feating T Kira Madden, Tegan and Sara, Bryan Washington, and more. | Book Marks
• How did an 11-day Chicago Teachers Union strike affect local librarians? | American Libraries
• In praise of The Public Domain Review, which features writing, maps, films, and other media oddities that have outlasted their copyright. | The Outline
• In an age of disinformation, could peer-reviewed books from university presses be some of our most reliable sources? | Vox
• On Constance Garnett, the legendary translator who “created the first mass English-reading audience for Dostoevsky and Chekhov.” | BLARB
• How rehab, Pete Doherty, and 127k Instagram followers produced the quintessentially British “model-poet,” Sonny Hall. | GQ
• Andy Cohen Books, an imprint of Henry Holt, is launching in 2020, and its inaugural list will feature a Mariah Carey memoir. | Publishers Weekly
• “Today, when a woman artist sets out to create, who is she?” Rachel Cusk on Cecilia Paul, Cecily Brown, and what it takes to thrive as a “woman artist.” | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: On the line between plagiarism and art • Victoria Brown on manifestations of violence in schools • Read from Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s new novel The Revisioners.