Lit Hub Daily: November 9, 2018

TODAY: In 1929, Imre Kertész, Holocaust survivor and the first Hungarian to win the Nobel in Literature, is born. 

• “His revisions seem to show the writer self-censoring phrases that could be seen as homoerotic.” See Oscar Wilde’s early handwritten edits to The Picture of Dorian Gray. | Lit Hub
• Five great books you may have missed last month, from people who turn into plants, to children who talk to the dead. | Lit Hub
• What folk music doesn’t get about actual folks: Brain Laidlaw on the pastoral fantasy in music and poetry.  | Lit Hub
• “Given the chance, we can survive the end of the world.” Read an interview with Anne Lamott. | Lit Hub
• “She lacks the courage to displease even more as a writer.” Simone de Beauvoir pulled no punches when it came to women writers. | Lit Hub
• Dana Levin and Carmen Giménez Smith talk race, poetics, and the “annihilating qualities” social media displays. | Lit Hub
• “He wanted to see into the shadow and to expose it.” Marie Howe remembers Tony Hoagland. | Lit Hub
• New titles from Lucia Berlin, Lee Child, Idra Novey, Sebastian Faulks, and more all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• In honor of the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day this Sunday, J. Kingston Pierce looks at 9 mysteries set in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. | CrimeReads
• Yasmine El Rashidi on Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, in which she “seems to be attempting to write as fast as information and reality change, as fast as truth turns to fiction and fact is annulled.” NYRB
• “Publishing a first book is like winning the lottery. Publishing a second is like acquiring another language through dreams. And a third? You might as well sit around and wait for divine revelation.” Navigating the uncertainty between the first book and all the imagined others. | Entropy
• The Tai Kwun Center for Heritage and Arts, the main venue for a literary festival in Hong Kong, has been criticized for cancelling events featuring exiled Chinese author Ma Jian. | The New York Times
• Jayne Svenungssoon has become the eighth person to leave the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, following allegations of sexual misconduct against Jean-Claude Arnault. | WTOC
• Today in adaptation Mad Libs: Gus Van Sant and Will Ferrell have signed on to Amazon Studios’ Prince of Fashion, based on Michael Chabon’s GQ article, “My Son, the Prince of Fashion”. | Deadline
• The season of scams continues? J. K. Rowling is suing her former assistant, who apparently spent thousands of the author’s pounds on cats and candles. | NYLON
• “We follow the news of Khashoggi’s murder very much on the script of a Columbo episode.” Turkey’s president is taking a cue from detective fiction in his handling of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. | Al Jazeera
• “Another thing that is mysteriously missing in great literature is male friendship”: Read an interview with Italian writer Paolo Cognetti. | Words Without Borders

Also on Lit Hub: Lit Hub Recommends • Meet National Book Award in Fiction finalist Jamel Brinkley • Read from The Little Snake

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