Lit Hub Daily: October 18, 2019

• Rereading a contemporary classic that’s all too lamentably current: John Freeman on J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron. | Lit Hub
• Murder in the Galapagos: the strange tale of the baroness and the bohemians. | Lit Hub
• Meme but not forgotten: RIP to all the glorious animals memorialized in our digital hearts. | Lit Hub
• Can Democrats keep up with Republican-controlled state majorities? Meaghan Winter on the importance of state versus federal politics. | Lit Hub
• “Bibliomania required, or at least implied, a librarian.” The role of librarians in a historical age of obsession. | Lit Hub
• “Plot becomes a logic machine that creaks under the weight of the inexplicable thing that has happened.” Jenn Ashworth on the limits of fiction after trauma. | Lit Hub
• New releases from Elizabeth Strout, Edna O’Brien, Bill Bryson, and Elton John all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• “Cities are full of horrors—of course they are. But does that make them any scarier than the suburbs, really?” Brenna Ehrlich on the quiet horror of reading Liane Moriarty in the suburbs. | CrimeReads
• “Geography is never an accident”: two new books examine the inequality of climate change. | The New Yorker
• The first winner of the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film went to Flannery, a documentary about Flannery O’Connor. | Fine Books
• “It’s censorship, plain and simple.” Someone is hiding the left-leaning books at an Idaho library. | Associated Press
• “I was interested in the people who are stuck with these memories and this legacy.” Read an interview with Steph Cha. | Longreads
• The Frankfurt Book Fair will commemorate Vaclav Havel, the anti-communist writer turned president of the Czech Republic, who inspired the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989. | DW
• “We were led to believe it was a book prize, not a career prize.”: One of this year’s Booker Prize judges, Afua Hirsch, seemed to imply that Margaret Atwood’s “titanic career” played a part in her win this year. | The Telegraph
• “We can’t let our work be driven by the anxieties around narrative scarcity.” Viet Thanh Nguyen on writing The Sympathizer. | The Millions

Also on Lit Hub: How Beth Brant uplifted the voices of Native American queer women • Orwell’s notes on 1984: Mapping the inspiration of a modern classic • Read an excerpt from Lara Vapnyar’s novel Divide Me by Zero.