Lit Hub Daily: May 22, 2019

• “It is a sign of maturity to put a slice on a plate and eat it with a fork, rather than mashing the pie into the face of your most hostile critic.” Ann Beattie has some post-book tour snack suggestions. | Lit Hub
• “I had become a master of cushioning the blows of life for my characters.” Brandon Taylor on learning when to protect his characters, and when not to. | Lit Hub
• A little bit of heartbreak and a lot of ocean: Danielle Evans gives us five reasons a writer should move to Baltimore. | Lit Hub
• “As I build a new worldview, it seems natural to return to literature that lets me view new worlds.” Veronica Scott Esposito on the paradigm shift that came with her transition. | Lit Hub
• Not here to make friends: on six of the best bad women in fiction. | Lit Hub
• Kate Mulgrew reflects on the work of waiting, in acting and in life. | Lit Hub
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Gabino Iglesias on Moby Dick, Goodreads, and nightmarish fairy tales. | Book Marks
• Celestial Bodies, written by Jokha Alharthi and translated by Marilyn Booth, has won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. | Book Marks
• Kinohi Nishikawa on the life and times of Donald Goines, who ushered in a new era of pulp fiction by black authors and for black audiences. | CrimeReads
• “What’s surreal to you is just somebody’s Wednesday somewhere.” Read an interview with Karen Russell (of Florida). | Jezebel
• “We are the people who spend our lives making things that are not true seem believable, and we don’t think Brexit is even a good effort.” John le Carré, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman and more writers against Brexit. | The Guardian
• John Waters bemoans his acceptability in this excerpt from his new book, Mr. Know-It-All: the Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. | The Paris Review
• Could this mysterious billboard in London mean that the long-awaited final novel in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series is imminent? | The Bookseller
• Turns out “classic” doesn’t have to mean “dead white dude”: Modern Library and Penguin Classics have both launched series “aimed at rediscovering forgotten books by marginalized people.” | Vox
• In Michigan, a state that ranks 47th in the country for its student-to-librarian ratio, legislators have proposed three bills to expand the presence of libraries and librarians at public schools. | WXYZ Detroit
• On Tuesday, German authorities gave Israel 5,000 documents that were kept by Franz Kafka’s confidant, Max Brod, which will form part of a Kafka collection in Israel’s National Library. | Leavenworth Times

Also on Lit Hub: Angie Kim breaks down the myth of the good mother on Reading Women • On Otherppl, Saskia Vogel talks BDSM dungeons in suburban Los Angeles • On the rebel Southern daughter who fought to expose white supremacy • Einstein and the devastating effects of WWI on science • Read an excerpt from Binnie Kirshenbaum’s new novel Rabbits for Food.