Lit Hub Daily: November 5, 2019

• Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo discusses the illusion of writers’ block, Oprah’s Book Club, and the beautiful bleakness of The Road. | Lit Hub
• Reporting from foul territory: Timothy Denevi on the White House lawn, listening to Donald Trump mess up baseball cliches. | Lit Hub Politics
• “When reproductive freedom becomes a class privilege, the human rights of our political body are negated.” Lindy West on breaking the silence around abortion. | Lit Hub Politics
• “Yes, science is yellow, yes, language and literature are green: Heather Christle’s patchwork approach to piecing together her book. | Lit Hub
• Sherrod Brown traces the unlikely history of Desk 88, the locus for generations of American progressivism. | Lit Hub Politics
• “We all could use Roosevelt’s wisdom, every day.” Nancy Pelosi on looking to Eleanor Roosevelt for hope. | Lit Hub Politics
• Rock, pop, and the development of avant-garde music after World War II: how experimental music blurred divisions between high and low art. | Lit Hub Music
• Five NYC-set novels that became NYC-set films, from If Beale Street Could Talk to The Great Gatsby. | Book Marks
• Lisa Jewell recommends nine books set in big houses with big secrets. | CrimeReads
• “It was basically an early colonial version of Footloose.” On America’s very first banned book—turns out we’ve been doing this nonsense since 1637. | Atlas Obscura
• The White House is attempting to expose and intimidate the anonymous senior official who is soon to publish a tell-all book about the dysfunction of the Trump administration. | The Hill
• Jean-Paul Dubois has won this year’s Prix Goncourt with a novel about a French prisoner who consoles himself by speaking to dead people (and a dog) from his life. | France24
• “The fact that we survived is a miracle to me. This is me making good on that miracle.” Tommy Pico on food, poetry, and cultural erasure. | Interview
• A Michigan woman faces up to 93 days in jail for… overdue library books. | New York Daily News
• “I think my work is interested in how people can learn to hold each other’s pain.” Andrea Long Chu on engaging with tough questions. | The Nation
• Anne Boyer’s The Undying exposes the world’s “injustices, inequities, and profit motives.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “This material is utterly unbearable today”: on the rise and fall of Booth Tarkington. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub: The 20 best works of nonfiction of the decade • Talk radio and the rage of the “silent majority”: A Rush Limbaugh case study • Read an excerpt from Shannon Pufahl’s debut novel, On Swift Horses.