Lit Hub Weekly: January 22 – 26, 2018

• Iconic science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin has died at 88. Read Le Guin’s best life advice and John Freeman’s last interview with the great writer. | The New York Times, Literary Hub
• Kathryn Schulz on the life and work of William Melvin Kelley, a lost literary great she discovered in a Maryland thrift shop (through a dedicated first edition of Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama). | The New Yorker
• “All right, I thought to myself, you will write about how altogether wanting first love is.” For her first turn as a Guardian Weekend columnist, Elena Ferrante revisits an adolescent romance. | The Guardian
• How to live like Haruki Murakami, Hunter S. Thompson, and other iconic writers (or nearly die trying). | VICE
• Cooking fairytale feasts from a collection even more “deliciously weird” than that of the Brothers Grimm: Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales. | The Paris Review
• “It was as though Karl Rove had taken the knife to his and George W. Bush’s America.” On Almost Zero, the Russian literary sensation believed to be written by Putin’s then-deputy chief of staff. | NYRB
• Librarians are experts in the organization and retrieval of information: On the importance of libraries in the era of fake news. | Entropy
• There’s no place like home: on the writers leading the Kansas literary renaissance. | The Millions
• “Harry Potter tends to mean something different to me, as it might to others who’ve endured trauma.” On taking comfort in Harry Potter’s adolescent anger after a brush with death. | The Atlantic
• The most beautiful things can be the most dangerous: How libraries handle Shadows From the Walls of Death, an arsenic-saturated book from 1874. | Atlas Obscura
• “People might take it more seriously than just thinking: ‘Some lunatic’s got a warehouse full of magazines.’” Inside the Hyman Archive, the largest private collection of magazines in the world. | The New York Times
• “Poetry, or Anthropologie sales rack? Is there a difference?” Soraya Roberts on the badness of Instapoetry. | The Baffler
• On solarpunk, a new genre of science fiction that imagines sustainable futures instead of dystopian hellscapes. | Ozy
• André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name, on watching the filming of “the most difficult and, perhaps, most important scene in my novel” (no, not that one). | Vanity Fair
• “Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness?” Answer: no. Traditional folktales were never about morality—so why is the culture they spawned so obsessed with the battle between good and evil? | Aeon

Those who can do, sometimes teach: 25 great writing manuals from 25 great writers • Arguing online with no one: on bad faith backlash and the Internet of takes • How to survive a wrongful conviction: the books that got me through 18 years on death row • Parenthood and God: Anjali Kumar discovers a need for the divine •  Defiance and grace at the opera: America and its neverending Gold Rush • Same as it ever was: Philip Metres considers Edward Said’s Orientalism at 40, and how far we (haven’t) come • How being a librarian makes me a better writer: Xhenet Aliu on the fine art of controlled vocabularies • Alafair Burke on writing The Wife, a psychological suspense that feels made for the #MeToo moment • You, too, can live in a house of mirth! How to decorate your house (and arrange your books) like Edith Wharton • Nobody’s shithole: Gabrielle Bellot looks at the history of vilifying Haiti and the Caribbean, from Pat Robertson to Donald Trump • On Barbara Comyns, outsider artist, who produced Gothic masterworks without a formal education • A 100-year history of the covers of Virginia Woolf • Mary Shelley: Abandoned by her creator and rejected by society? • Celeste Ng talks to Mira K. Lee about craft, identity, and lifting up fellow writers • 11 pop songs for literary people (this one’s for you, folks)