Lit Hub Daily: November 2, 2021

• “Just say it directly—is my mantra for a book like this.” Elizabeth Strout talks about her latest novel, Oh William! | Lit Hub

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• For Freeman’s, Lina Mounzer, Rick Bass, and Zahia Rahmani consider what “change” means in 2021. | Lit Hub Freeman’s

• “Even when another dog bites him, he is convinced that it was an accident, he cannot accept it as intentional.” Read a letter from Gertrude Stein about her beloved dog, Basket. | Lit Hub

• Why it matters that Van Gogh was a lifelong reader. | Lit Hub Art

• The Empress of Vice: How Polly Adler became the literati’s favorite madam in Jazz Age New York. | Lit Hub History

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• Corey Sobel makes an impassioned case for football—“the lurking, gigantic shadow self of this country”—as the most literary of American sports. | Lit Hub

• “Even God needed to start over after the Flood.” Peter Ho Davies’s advice for embracing revision. | Lit Hub Craft

• Tom McCarthy returns to Edouard Glissant’s unclassifiable 1990 masterpiece, The Poetics of Relation. | Lit Hub Criticism

• After her teenage cousin’s fatal crime, Katharine Blake tries to pin down the nebulous concept of heartbreak. | Lit Hub

• Will Harrison discusses photographer Larry Sultan’s project to document his parents’ lives and “puncture [the] mythology of the family” in the Reagan era. | The Baffler

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• “There is not one way of being a Black writer. You can do what you want.” Ron Stodghill catches up with Colson Whitehead. | WSJ. Magazine

• Stanley Tucci talks to Helen Rosner about the power of simplicity, in writing and food. | The New Yorker

• How two new biographies of Edgar Allan Poe give us a view of the writer as “not a uniquely troubled outcast but something far more representative of his age.” | Public Books

• Muriel Leung considers the poetics of erasure. | Poetry Foundation

• “If labels are included, is it an invitation for readers to test their validity? Is that a test one can truly pass? Is any of this actually the point of fiction?” Christopher Gonzalez on writing bisexual characters. | Poets & Writers

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• Fear not: Jane Austen’s house is getting a new roof. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: What to read this month, based on your zodiac sign • On Jay Gatsby, the most famous North Dakotan • Read from Sarah Winman’s latest novel, Still Life