Lit Hub Daily: November 17, 2021

• “Taylor Swift is almost like Coke—you can’t not have an opinion on her.” A conversation with Amy Long, the writer behind the “Taylor Swift As Books” Instagram account. | Lit Hub

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• What Philip Larkin teaches us about finding our “poetic voice.” | Lit Hub Poetry

• “I spent a few minutes fretting that no one would know how thrilling it was to see them in a novel, this wink to All the Gays of Seoul.” Anton Hur on translating Sang Young Park. | Lit Hub Translation

• How Picasso—with coaxing from surrealist writer and artist friends—built the foundation for the Surrealist movement. | Lit Hub Art

• David Damrosch considers how Wole Soyinka’s 1975 play, Death and the King’s Horseman, threads multiple literary strands and real events. | Lit Hub Theater

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• When Philhellenism was in vogue: How Greece’s struggle for liberty inspired “a new kind of mass politics that used the arenas of bourgeois urban life” to call for change. | Lit Hub History

• Dave Eggers talks Lorrie Morre, Corduroy the bear, and the wild eloquence of Frankenstein’s monster. | Book Marks 

• “I’m just trying to work on being transparent for people, because I do sense that we intimidate ourselves out of our own destinies, I think, a lot.” Saeed Jones on the challenges of writing about yourself for public consumption. | Very Fine Day

• How librarians are dealing with calls for book bans. | Time

• Anton Hur, translator of Love in the Big City, discusses Sang Young Park’s work and the process of translation.  | Grove

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• Dina Gachman revisits Motel of the Mysteries, a 1970s children’s book about a 41st-century archeologist trying to make sense of an America buried beneath trash. | Vox

• “There is great pleasure to be found in allowing oneself to knowingly be hoodwinked.” Rhian Sassen on the seduction of Anne Serre’s fiction. | The Point

• Matt Tierney talks about literature and developing the “mass normalization of resistance to deadly ways of looking at the world.” | Public Books

• Rax King celebrates “tackiness” and art that inspires an “immediate, joyful reaction.” | NPR

Also on Lit Hub: Ethan Joella on growing up with Browseabout Books • James Holland on the challenges of fighting inside a tank • Read from Okezie Nwoka’s debut novel, God of Mercy