Lit Hub Daily: May 28, 2019

• “These poems are arguments and conversations that America should be having with itself right now.” Dean Kuipers reads Jim Harrison’s posthumous poetry collection. | Lit Hub
• Are you a Roger or a Tiger? Hamilton Cain on specialization versus variety, and David Epstein’s Range. | Lit Hub
• While hiking Cormac McCarthy’s Western wilderness Raksha Vasudevan comes face to face with the myths that make America. | Lit Hub
• “On a Sunbeam gives us that city, or cosmos, of women and non-binary people, made extraordinary by virtue of its sheer ordinariness.” Gabrielle Bellot on the dreamy, queer space opera we need right now. | Lit Hub
• “If you look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel?” Ian Fleming explains how to write a thriller. | Lit Hub
• What can we learn from the decline of Turkish democracy? Ece Temelkuran on Erdogan, Trump, and the slow descent into the banality of evil. | Lit Hub
• This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians: Mary Catherine Kinniburgh on the treasures of the New York Public Library. | Book Marks
• The White Devil’s Daughter author Julia Flynn Siler recommends five books of narrative history, from Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains to Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. | Book Marks
• The reigning queen of crime Sara Paretsky, in conversation with Lori Rader-Day, talks writing, feminism, and life. | CrimeReads
• “As some of you like to point out in your emails, I am 60 years old and fat, and you don’t want me to ‘pull a Robert Jordan’ on you and deny you your book.” What George R. R. Martin, Hilary Mantel, Anne Rice, and others have said about being under pressure from fans. | The Guardian
• Hulu has ordered an anthology horror series based on Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters, which came out in 2013 from Kelly Link’s Small Beer Press. | Deadline
• “You can unite millions of people by making them believe in completely fictional stories about God, about race or about economics.” Historian Yuval Noah Harari on why fiction trumps truth. | The New York Times
• Kathryn Scanlan on how she plucked a stranger’s diary from the trash and turned it into her debut novel. | Publishers Weekly
• “Over the course of a season, Doolittle estimates he will read about 25 books, a lighter load than during the rest of the year”: On Washington Nationals closer Sean Doolittle’s mission to support independent bookstores during the travel season. | The Wall Street Journal
• Some of John Lennon’s handwritten poems from his book A Spaniard in the Works will go to auction in London next month. | Just Collecting

Also on Lit Hub: On So Many Damn Books, comics legend Seth Talks Virginia Woolf, Charles Schultz, and his latest book • The origins of Jean-Michel Basquiat • Meg Donohue on the enduring appeal of literary retellings • Read from Gabriela Ybarra’s debut novel, The Dinner Guest (trans. Natasha Wimmer).