Lit Hub Weekly: May 6 – 10, 2019

TODAY: In 2001, Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime, dies. 

• A new app from Google, Poem Portraits, is an interactive poem generator that is using artificial intelligence, images and 20 million words from 19th-century poetry to create a massive collective poem. | AndroitPIT
• “The acoustics can be a nightmare.” The Boston Lyric Opera is mounting a production of The Handmaid’s Tale  (the opera) in a basketball stadium. | The New York Times
• “If writing novels has taught me anything, it’s that progress isn’t linear.” Laura Lippman on tennis, competition, and the unexpected pleasure of being mediocre at something. | Glamour
• Imtiaz Dharker has turned down the job of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. | The Guardian
• As nations gauge the health of democracies around the world, authors, historians, booksellers and more are taking an interest in one peculiar market: fascism. | Los Angeles Times
• “Brawler, he said. The other girls told me what happened and I didn’t think they’d let you out.” Read a new short story by Lauren Groff. | The New Yorker
• “There are so many ways to justify feeling inadequate about an acceptance.” When winning an NEA Fellowship changes everything (just not for the better). | Fanzine
• “They trekked by horse-drawn buggy, with children clinging to their carriage, and bleating goats scurrying past”: Ratha Tep retraces Truman Capote and Jack Dunphy’s favorite Mediterranean locales, where some of Capote’s most famous works were written. | The New York Times
• “One book doesn’t have to represent everything about a culture. ” A profile of Amy Tan, 30 years after The Joy Luck Club’s publication. | EW
• Peek inside Edmund de Waal’s library of exile at the 58th Venice Biennale. | Wallpaper
• Don’t feel bad about not reading—blame Mark Zuckerberg instead. After all, “he doesn’t want you to dive head first into literature; nobody ever broke off from reading War and Peace to impulse buy a new nest of saucepans.” | The Guardian
• How did Sherwood Anderson’s fictional Midwestern town of Winesburg become “a cultural byword, a metaphor for the yawning emptiness of rural life”? | The New York Times
• Behold, 19 great books from indie presses that you should read. | BuzzFeed News
• “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” Reading Mary Oliver in the age of distraction. | The Atlantic
• Karen Russell would like to recommend superstitions—”not because they change the future, but because they articulate a wish.” | The New York Times Magazine

Also on Lit Hub:

Author photos: a taxonomy • Jon Meacham on E.B. White and American democracy • Sixteen poet biopics, ranked • Douglas Brinkley on our love of ranking American presidents • On illustrating the ideas of Walter Benjamin • As we welcome the Royal Baby, Robert Morrison wonders why America is so obsessed with the British royal family • Who creates an Australian national literature? Nam Le on David Malouf and the violence of world-building • Nina Subin on the careful process of taking an author’s photo • On creating a new toolkit for memoir writing • The passionate beginnings of Georg Forster, revolutionary travel writer

 • Natasha Trethewey on Eudora Welty’s photographs • How a run-down Hollywood hotel achieved legend status • On the selfie-filled memoir of Halldór Laxness • Patricia Dwyer on Elizabeth Bishop, loss, and coming out after 20 years in a convent • Erika Swyler on the autobiographical truths of fiction • Damian Barr moves from memoir to fiction and finds inspiration in a real life crime • On class, gender, and the weird dynamics of eating beef in America • Existential dread and the art of boat-building: on fatherhood and large projects that make no sense • On the Chinese American laborers who built the Transcontinental Railroad • Is it still “punk” when the musician makes it big? • The paradoxes of prison rehabilitation: Rachel Louise Snyder on the struggle to learn nonviolence in a violent place • How the Bubonic Plague almost came to America • One German’s two-decade search for a poem she couldn’t quite name • Balancing power in the Lebanese borderlands • Esi Edugyan on the fraught relationship between the writer and the void • And in honor of  MOTHER’S DAY this Sunday, some of the many ways of looking at motherhood: • Tobias Wolff on the iconic memoir he never intended to write • John McMurtrie finds his mother in the pages of her favorite cookbook • The stories mothers never tell: a collaborative essay • Sarah Knott, in the moments after birth • “Original Fire,” a poem by Louise Erdrich

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

W.M. Akers grapples with the all-too-frequent elements of hate in classic pulp fiction • It’s not all sun and fun in the French Riviera: Crime along the Cote d’Azur •  Lisa Levy recommends 

May’s best psychological thrillers •  Editor Juliet Grames on writing her first book – and breaking all her own rules • Vince Houghton on Stanley Lovell, the chemist behind some of WWII’s craziest schemes • Mollie Cox Bryan rounds up the best mysteries set during Hollywood’s Golden Age • Casey Cep talks true crime, deep research, and following in Harper Lee’s footsteps • Laura Elliot rounds up the 10 greatest crime novels set on islands • Tim Hennessy on what made Milwaukee noir • Who really killed McKinley?Lawrence Goldstone investigates • Laird Barron on the indelible mark of the Alaskan wilderness, in life and in noir

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