Lit Hub Daily: November 6, 2019

• Ok billionaire: Rebecca Solnit on the unfounded self-importance (and self-pity!) of the richest of the rich. | Lit Hub
• Before wokeness, there was sleep: on stillness as a form of dissent, from Vietnam die-ins to Black Lives Matter to the occupying of public parks. | Lit Hub
• In Trump Nation, a dress rehearsal for a civil war: Larry Siems revisits America, October 2016. | Lit Hub
• “There is a strange and beautiful convergence between the art of Hemingway in general and the art of Unity Temple in particular.” On Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and the “art of omission.” | Lit Hub
• “The world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector.” Mariana Enriquez, in praise of Silvina Ocampo. | Lit Hub
• The gay activists who fought the American psychiatric establishment: Mo Rocca on the struggle to depathologize homosexuality. | Lit Hub
• Rosalie Knecht and Idra Novey discuss translation, writing tension, and literary “retrenchment.” | Lit Hub
• Tiffany Midge describes the surreal absurdity of preparing for her mother’s death, “laughing until our bellies ached, spitting death right in the eye.” | Lit Hub
• Loving Anna Karenina, hating Madame Bovary, and more rapid-fire book recs from Esmé Weijun Wang. | Book Marks
• Kirstin Innes delivers an ode to Laura Lee, “escort, sex workers’ rights campaigner, single mother, law student, and ferocious, hilarious political powerhouse.” | CrimeReads
• Appreciating Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life, the “compelling but unwieldy” book that eluded the Russian canon. | The Atlantic
• Giulia Pines spent $1,395 for a workshop in Provence with literary grifter Anna March—and doesn’t regret it for a second. | Vox
• Novelist Ernest Gaines, whose books include A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, died Tuesday at 86. | The Advocate
• The Paris Review is giving Richard Ford—who famously spit on Colson Whitehead after Whitehead gave him a negative review—a lifetime achievement award, and people are not thrilled. | The Guardian
• Revisiting the fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti, the 20th-century Uruguayan writer who, though beloved, depicted his country as a “place marked by pettiness, idiocy and squalor.” | The New York Times
• “Reading Ruskin, you begin to think that he more or less lived at the tip of his pencil, in the nib of his pen”: Verlyn Klinkenborg on the 19th-century polymath par excellence John Ruskin. | New York Review Daily

Also on Lit Hub: What was it like to bake the royal wedding cake? • Mimi Lok on writing in (and for) the margins • Read an excerpt from Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other.