Lit Hub Daily: October 3, 2018

• “Reading for this year’s anthology was as much a political act, and a way of taking a stand, as my writing.” Roxane Gay on what makes a story political in 2018. | Lit Hub
• Matthew Daddona talks to Diane Williams, beloved writer’s writer, and master of the (very) short story. | Lit Hub
• 23 women horror writers who are (almost) scarier than the patriarchy. | Lit Hub
• “I imagine him moving through the world apologizing for just being.” Nicole R. Fleetwood on raising a black son not to be afraid.| Lit Hub
• Leif Enger on the equalizing power of the kite (and why he never leaves home without one). | Lit Hub
• Ingrid Persaud’s debut story, “The Sop,” wins the BBC National Short Story Award. | Lit Hub
• “I’m in 221B Baker Street, the residence of Sherlock Holmes.But I’m not in London. I’m in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.” Rebecca Romney on the painstaking replication of Sherlockiana in real life. | CrimeReads
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Kristin Iversen on The Lover and the amorphous boundaries of the literary world. | Book Marks
• Book Marks and The Great American Read: Villains and Monsters. | Book Marks
• Wait, was Hemingway funny? Verna Kale on the dark humor in A Farewell to Arms. | BLARB
• “I’ve heard lots of criticism of what I’m doing,” she said. “I’ve been told these aren’t stories.” Rumaan Alam profiles Diane Williams, whose new Collected Stories has 784 pages of . . . stories. | The New York Times
• “I still remember that original encounter, how it felt like a flare from my own secret world, all the inchoate longings and obsessions of being a teen-ager somehow rendered into book form.” Emma Cline on The Virgin Suicides. | The New Yorker
• “Before #MeToo, I had not really understood the connection between power and sexual abuse.” What a Swedish professor learned from a month of reading only classic feminist texts. | The Guardian
• From Andrea Dworkin to Brittney Cooper, the books Rebecca Traister read while writing Good and Mad (and two she wishes she had). | The Cut
• Tayari Jones, Rachel Kushner, Kiese Laymon, Alexander Chee, and many more: the 2019 ALA Carnegie Longlists for fiction and nonfiction have been announced. | Andrew Carnegie
• Amazon is investing in literary fantasy adaptations, picking up Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens and ordering Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. | The A.V. Club

Also on Lit Hub: Why strikes matter • A poem by Diana Khoi Nguyen • Read from White Dancing Elephants