Lit Hub Daily: September 15, 2022

• “There is a kind of freedom in divorcing the maker from what is made.” Kailyn McCord considers the myth of the Made Writer. | Lit Hub Writing Life

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• What do you get when you add two autobiographical writers, one chimerical protagonist, and a 455-page screenplay? Malcolm Lowry’s (fruitless) attempt to adapt Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. | Lit Hub Film

• “Our imagination gives way to our truest power.” Nine Black Diasporic voices imagine a better world. | Lit Hub

• Bruce Handy explores the long history of weaponized words, starting with a (racist) 19th-century hoax. | Lit Hub History

• THE ANNOTATED NIGHTSTAND: What Tammy Nguyễn is reading now and next, from Republic to The Ocean of Air. | Lit Hub

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• How Moll Cutpurse embraced gender nonconformity in the 1600s. | Lit Hub

• Codebreakers and secret-keepers: On the first women spies in the CIA. | Lit Hub

• “Young men were being influenced to end their lives—by a book.” Dr. Nicholas Kardaras on Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and the dangers of social contagion. | Lit Hub Psychology

• “I feel the most ridiculous thing is certainty.” Yiyun Li talks to Alexandra Kleeman about dogma and grief. | The New York Times

• “She often represented people who illustrated the flip side … it’s a very classic ‘Ruthian,’ as I call it, approach.” Nina Totenberg on her friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. | NPR

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• Bruna Dantas Lobato on Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage: “Chinese American women hope for a similar Happy Interlude, if not a happy ending.” | Astra Magazine

• “Through his many periods of innovation, Godard never forgot that in art, as in life, beauty persuades.” Blair McClendon on Jean-Luc Godard. | n+1

• Jessica Swoboda reflects on The Point’s Criticism in Public interview series, and “do[ing] justice to the plurality of perspectives” in literary studies. | The Point

• What’s the best way to run a successful book club? | The Atlantic

• Lisa Russ Spaar looks at second books of poetry by Kate Daniels, Chloe Honum, and Corey Van Landingham. | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Also on Lit Hub: Are smarter people more prone to irrational biases? • New poetry by Aldo Amparán • Read Oleg Sentsov’s story (tr. Uilleam Blacker) from the new collection Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukraine Stories