Lit Hub Daily: October 24, 2018

• “You fear the sky. You fear the wind. You no longer live in paradise. Maybe you never did.” On Puerto Rican nationhood, after Hurricane María. | Lit Hub
• “Mother is a political category, and it is also a symbolic category”: five writers on what it means to write about motherhood. | Lit Hub
• Sure, The Joy of Sex is good, but have you tried making endless lists of books that defined their decades? Here’s the 1970s!
• So near and yet so far… also, red. On science-fiction’s long-standing, so-far-unrequited love of Mars. | Lit Hub
• “How powerful an experience to read a story like my own.” Jerome Blanco on what happened when he took a break from white writers. | Lit Hub
• “History teaches us that no wall will stand forever.” Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on Trump, conscience, and peace. | Lit Hub
• “Nobody wrote scoundrels the way Ross Thomas could.” Neil Nyren breaks down the life and work of a master. | CrimeReads
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: J. Howard Rosier on Heart of Darkness, Marcia Douglas, and The Last Samurai. | Book Marks
• Reviews of every collection on the T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist, one of the world’s most prestigious poetry awards. | Book Marks
• From the archives: listen to a recording of Susan Sontag delivering her “Illness as Metaphor” lecture in 1977. | NYIH
• Think the Trump-Russia scandal sounds like the seedy plot of a political thriller? You’re not alone. Five crime novelists imagine possible outcomes for Trump. | The New York Times
• Todd Bol, the man behind the Little Free Library, has died at 62. | Melville House
• Are translators untouchable? Tim Parks on the delicate art of reviewing translations. | New York Review of Books
• In actually-good news, NYC has allocated a record-breaking $198.4 million for the city’s cultural budget. | Hyperallergic
• Leslie Feinberg, Akwaeke Emezi, Andrea Lawlor, Jordy Rosenberg: toward creating a trans literary canon. | The Paris Review
• “I think that there are a lot of younger poets who want to be better writers. And then there are a lot of younger poets who just want to be better known. Those two things are very different.” An interview with Ada Limón. | The Creative Independent

Also on Lit Hub: Kristen Arnett offers 20 true stories of library horror • Read from Everything Under