Lit Hub Daily: October 22, 2018

• Lev Grossman on fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons, lost worlds, and the “strange narcotic power” of fictional maps. | Lit Hub
• From Atlas Shrugged to The Catcher in the Rye, the 10 books that defined the 1950s are almost as controversial as this whole series. | Lit Hub
• The other south of France: on wine, wisdom, and the last castles of the Cathars in the Pyrenees. | Lit Hub
• “It’s a pretty idea turned into action.” An interview with a Girls Write Now mentor and mentee. | Lit Hub
• “Song of the Sad Guitar.” A poem by Marilyn Chin. | Lit Hub
• On the new episode of But That’s Another Story, Larry Kramer talks to Will Schwalbe about art, activism, and adapting D.H. Lawrence. | Lit Hub
• From the purely evil, to the deeply ambivalent, to the unequivocally good, Catriona McPherson guides us through crime fiction’s many visions of motherhood. | CrimeReads
• From J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World to N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, 10 Cli-Fi Novels for the Dark Days Ahead. | Book Marks
• Kaitlyn Greenidge interviews the doulas fighting on the frontlines against the black maternal health crisis. | Lenny
• 10 books about electoral politics to read before the American midterms. | Autostraddle
• Bad outfits, awkward poses, cut-and-paste jobs, Dracula with an underbite? On the almost unbelievably bad book covers of Wordsworth Classics. | Electric Literature
• “Baldwin and Coetzee crossed the ocean in different directions. Yet they were fleeing from societies that were very similar.” What James Baldwin and J. M. Coetzee can teach us about history and home. | The Offing
• “I am from an era when we learned not to waste songs.” Read an excerpt from Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest. | Vulture
• Eight-year-old girl pulls a sword out of a lake like King Arthur, is now probably Queen of Sweden. | The Guardian
• How do we know what we know about the past? Alex Carp on Jill Lepore’s monumental new volume on the history of the United States. | NYRB

Also on Lit Hub: Pablo Martín Sánchez on writing about the anarchist who shared his name • Tishani Doshi in conversation with Peter Mishler • Read a story from Training School for Negro Girls