Lit Hub Daily: October 11, 2018

• “If you feel like feminism is failing you, you are not alone.” Charlotte Shane on commodified feminism, and the dangers of the mainstream. | Lit Hub
• “Adoptees have so rarely gotten to tell their own stories.” Nicole Chung talks to Mira Jacob about her new memoir. | Lit Hub
• “I’ll have one McGangbang, please.” Alison Pearlman on the weird world of secret menus. | Lit Hub
• “Our stories are our power, our key to survival.” Gabrielle Bellot on Brett Kavanaugh, who we believe, and her own story of abuse. | Lit Hub
• In honor of Elmore Leonard’s birthday, Leonard’s 25 greatest opening lines, ranked. | CrimeReads
• Stephen King on Tana French, Lauren Groff on Deborah Eisenberg, a Mitch Albom beatdown, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Lauren Groff, Sigrid Nunez, Terrance Hayes, Jenny Xie and more: the finalists for the 2018 National Book Awards have been announced. | National Book Foundation
• Was Ovid the founding father of pickup artistry? (Hard no. But the Red Pill community still claims the Roman poet as one of their own.) | The Atlantic
• “Tales of female suffering, though profuse, are often dismissed as trivial or self-indulgent. Victims fare best when they do not yell, when they dwell not on injustice”: Katy Waldman on female authorship and #MeToo. | The New Yorker
• An interview with historian Joseph Crespino, whose biography of Atticus Finch unpacks Harper Lee’s ambivalence towards her most famous character, and challenges  our “romanticized notions of racial morality.” | Pacific Standard
• “I always feel that I’ve seen a thing after I’ve described it.” Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Powers in conversation. | PW
• “They said the photocopy was killing the book, but we knew that literature survived in those stained pages.” Alejandro Zambra on the magic of the literary photocopy. | The Paris Review
• Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Nickel Boys—which explores the horrors of a Florida reform school under Jim Crow—will be released in July of 2019. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Isabel Allende’s complicated history of fictionalizing national tragedy • An excerpt of Nora Krug’s graphic memoir on homesickness and Heimat • Read from In Your Hands