Lit Hub Daily: May 16, 2019

• On discovering an iconic literary character was inspired by your grandfather. (Catch-22‘s Yossarian really did live.) | Lit Hub
• “In the whole wide world, there are subjects beyond power and other people besides the right men.” Caroline Fraser on Robert Caro, great men, and the problem of powerful women in biography. | Lit Hub
• The winners of the 100th annual O. Henry Prize! | Lit Hub
• “What do you call a villain when she finally gets to tell her own story?” On a new generation of villainous women, from witches to wicked stepmothers. | Lit Hub
• Sakia Vogel talks to Philip Teir about grief, Mary Gaitskill, and the City of Angels. | Lit Hub
• Pibulsak Lakonpol’s dispatch from a refugee’s no man’s land at the Thai-Burmese border. | Lit Hub
• David McCullough’s The Pioneers: vibrant and compelling OR told with a narrow perspective? | Book Marks
• Karen Russell’s uncanny worlds, Walter Isaacson on George Packer on Richard Holbrooke, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Summer is here! Which means it’s time to read some crime fiction. Here are over 100 picks from the summer’s best and hottest titles. | CrimeReads
• “I feel like I’m the great American crime writer. You can make that case.” Read a profile of James Ellroy, “the Demon Dog of American fiction.” | 1843
• On the “pernicious, scapegoating effect” of J.D. Vance’s vision of Appalachia—and the many other voices that should be championed instead. | The Baffler
• “Belinda Blinked is writing so bad that it transcends mere constructs of quality and becomes its own absurdist feat of virtuosity.” On My Dad Wrote a Porno and the joy of reading really, really bad sex scenes in literature. | The Atlantic
• William Boyd on John Buchan, the late Victorian-era Scot whose book The Thirty-Nine Steps improbably inspired a Hitchcock film and the modern spy novel. | New Statesman
• “On August 27, Hemingway mailed La Cossitt the most remarkable document he ever sent to Collier’s: his expense account.” The story of Hemingway’s $187,000 magazine expenses claim. | CJR
• Maybe the most important takeaway from the mediocre final season of Game of Thrones is how good of an imagination George R.R. Martin has. | The Ringer
• “We’ve all had to respond to America as it existed at a given time.”: An interview with Maurice Carlos Ruffin on race, political activism and the American South. | LARB

Also on Lit Hub: Juliet Grames on restoring the legacies of our difficult grandmothers on The Maris Review • Dani Shapiro on unraveling her family’s history • The time Samuel Johnson met James Boswell (in a bookstore, naturally) • Read from Julia Phillips’ debut novel Disappearing Earth.