Lit Hub Daily: October 17, 2018

• We really should have more illustrated interviews: Liana Finck and Amy Kurzweil talk family stories and female lineage, and draw shadows and gods. | Lit Hub
• In today’s edition of Reading Across America: Brooklyn’s Tables of Contents, a blessed union of literature and food. | Lit Hub
• So we beat on, website against the backlash, borne ceaselessly into the controversy, with our series of books that defined the decades: 1920s edition. | Lit Hub
• “We Angelenos perfected a smoggy lifestyle that was modern and chic.” Héctor Tobar on (literal and metaphorical) California smog. | Lit Hub
• Why Ward Just—America’s best political novelist—is required reading in 2018. | Lit Hub
• Anna Burns has won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel, Milkman. | Lit Hub
• “I think that’s a real bonus to writing these Holmes pastiches: the ability to shed a light on people who’ve been marginalized and kept in the dark.” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in conversation with fellow Sherlockian Lyndsay Faye. | CrimeReads
• In the wake of Anna Burns’ Man Booker Prize win, we look back at what the critics wrote about every Booker Prize winner of the 21st century. | Book Marks
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: award-winning poet Lisa Russ Spaar on Wuthering Heights, Ron Slate, and canine literary critics. | Book Marks
• Book Marks and The Great American Read: classic novels of fantastical worlds, from One Hundred Years of Solitude to The Lord of the Rings. | Book Marks
• “That’s literally the only reason I became a journalist — just so my name could be on a piece of paper.” José Olivarez, Jose Antonio Vargas, and Julissa Arce on immigration, belonging, and the emotional toll of being undocumented. | The New York Times
• ICM agent Binky Urban (who represents Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, among others) on David Carr, going to bat for American Psycho, and why she’s not interested in power. | Vulture
• PEN America is suing President Trump in an effort to stop his attacks against journalists and a free press. | AP
• When writing (and reading) Harry Potter fan fiction doubles as effective sex-ed. | Shondaland
• “We’re currently trapped in this terrifying cycle of mass shootings that makes the book feel more realist than I ever intended.” Jeff Jackson and Laura van den Berg on the ethics of writing violence. | FSG Work in Progress
• “You were in Grandmama’s living room delicately placing a blinking black angel with a fluorescent mink coat on top of her Christmas tree while Uncle Jimmy and I were examining each other’s bodies in a one-bedroom apartment in Bloomington, Indiana.” Read an excerpt from Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. | Longreads

Also on Lit Hub: Elif Shafak reflects on the women in her life • Simon Sebag Montefiore on the worst pope ever • Read from Destroy All Monsters