Lit Hub Daily: September 18, 2023

• “Writing was the one thing in his life he was not ambivalent about.” On the making of Larry McMurtry, chronicler of the American West. | Lit Hub

• The right to read (in private): Anthony Aycock on the links between book bans and the FBI’s controversial Library Awareness Program. | Lit Hub Politics

• Lessons in craft from James Baldwin’s Another Country. | Lit Hub Craft

• Alicia Elliott considers the tired trope of madness in fiction. | Lit Hub

• Leonardo Padura muses on Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, a “book of voyages through space and time.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• “Is there anyone more vain, more laughable, more exploitative yet morally self-serious than the novelist?” Jordan Kisner considers the questions of The Fraud. | The Atlantic

• Sarah Weinman profiles Richard Osman, the novelist behind the Thursday Murder Club phenomenon. | Esquire

• Rebecca Mead considers how the Bloomsbury Group’s revolt against Victorian formality and gender norms continues to inspire fashion today.  | The New Yorker

• “We worry about what it means to define certain content, such as LGBTQ content, as being inappropriate for young readers.” After their previous book was banned extensively, Mariko and Jillian Tamak discuss their new book, Roaming. | The Walrus

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the books that changed her. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: How digital platforms influence what we consume • Dong Li on the “common tongue of poetry” • Read from Christine Evans’s debut novel, Nadia