Lit Hub Daily: October 16, 2019

• Deborah Levy talks David Bowie, theater training, and beating writers’ block with a good swim. | Lit Hub
• Please (quietly) enjoy this ranking of 50 fictional librarians.| Lit Hub
• “The allure of the swing shift is about using darkness as a shield, using unconventionality as a bolster.” How Anna Maxymiw’s unusual schedule saved her writing. | Lit Hub
• Peacocks, Easter, and Ship of Fools: Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter’s friendship in letters. | Lit Hub
• “Midnight Train to Georgia.” A poem by Nathalie Handal from the collection Life in a Country Album. | Lit Hub
• In an excerpt from his graphic memoir, David Heatley draws his mother’s weight loss journey. | Lit Hub
• “Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner.” The late Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian’s place in the American canon. | Lit Hub
• Demystifying the writer’s fear of failure: Sarah Labrie on why writing is supposed to be difficult. | Lit Hub
• Joyce Carol Oates talks crime writing, character, and twitter with Thomas Pluck (and also cats). | CrimeReads
• “Edna O’Brien is a literary marvel”: Lori Feathers on the oeuvre of an icon. | Book Marks
• Dublin city officials have proposed a plan to repatriate James Joyce’s remains. | The Guardian
• “We need to use the language of crisis.” Four storytellers on writing about climate change. | Guernica
• R.O. Kwon talks to Ali Wong about the evolution of a joke, (never) eating at P.F. Chang’s, and being a Halloween costume. | Datebook
• A reading list from legendary rapper (and literacy advocate) Talib Kweli, who briefly resurrected Brooklyn’s first black-owned bookstore at an October arts festival. | Document Journal
• Best-selling literary critic Harold Bloom, a controversial advocate of the Western canon, has died at 89. | The Hub
• “The choice of Mr. Handke implies a concept of literature safe from the infelicities of history and actualities of human life and death.” Aleksandar Hemon on Peter Handke, “the Bob Dylan of genocide apologists.” | The New York Times
• Have we, as humans, been getting happier or sadder? A sentiment analysis program has analyzed the last 200 years of literature in an attempt to find out. | Vox

Also on Lit Hub: On the film that brought the birthplace of Chicago blues alive • Leah Vernon: a day in the life of a fat model • Read a story from Benjamin Percy’s collection Suicide Woods.