Lit Hub Daily: September 10, 2019

• Rosie Schaap spends a night trailing poet-turned-sommelier Amanda Smeltz. | Lit Hub
• “Sometimes it feels as though I have a foot planted on two tectonic plates pulling in opposite directions.” Tash Aw on living and writing as a divided Southeast Asian. | Lit Hub
• “The Spanish secret police had some of the spirit of the Gestapo, but not much of its competence”: on the Communist plot to assassinate George Orwell. | Lit Hub
• “The world is made soundless when you can’t hear your beloveds.” Mirza Waheed on Kashmir under siege.| Lit Hub
• Extend your summer with these August books may have missed, including a whimsical mystery and a “a pisco-filled journey up the cordillera.” | Lit Hub
• Jhumpa Lahiri on editing an anthology of Italian fiction, and the need for more literature in translation. | Lit Hub
• From the ruins of Rome to the invention of perspective: on the genius of Filippo Brunelleschi. | Lit Hub
• The Divers’ Game author Jesse Ball recommends five texts that changed his students forever. | Book Marks
• Were all the best 1990s rom-coms detective stories in disguise? Olivia Rutigliano investigates. | CrimeReads
• On the bizarre, eclectic life of Lafcadio Hearn, the 19th-century Greek-Irish writer whose collections of Japanese ghost stories added a modern twist to Victorian gothic horror. | The New Yorker
• Crétien van Campen on drug-induced synesthesia—the “uncommon collaboration of several senses at once”—and its influence on the work of writers from Keats and Coleridge to Poe and Baudelaire. | The MIT Press Reader
• “Toni Morrison didn’t win the Nobel Prize for dispensing banal platitudes; she got it for writing scabrous, gorgeous, complex books.” Sandra Newman makes a case against mourning beloved authors by reducing them to a series of quotes. | The Washington Post
• Alice McDermott recommends her favorite short novels, from Train Dreams to Mrs. Dalloway. | The Paris Review
• You should probably start reading right before bed—turns out those who do make more money, eat better food, and love their lives more than those who don’t. Coincidence? | Real Simple
• Felipe Neto, a Brazilian YouTuber, gave away 14,000 LGBTQ-themed books at Rio de Janiero’s international book fair to protest censorship by the city’s conservative Christian mayor. | The Advocate
• “In the case of a poet as famous as Dickinson, one might wish that Harvard would relax its grip.” On the ownership of Emily Dickinson. | LARB

Also on Lit Hub: “The writer in me wanted to get it all down”: on First Draft, Katie Arnold on writing about loss • Jennifer Croft, Angie Cruz, and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire • In honor of Margaret Atwood Day, some photos of the author through the years • Read an excerpt of Petina Gappah’s new novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light.