Lit Hub Daily: November 26, 2019

• Your holiday streaming guide! A literary adaptation for every Thanksgiving vibe, from “sullen ex-teen” to “concerned about climate change but can’t talk to your family about it.” | Lit Hub
• Of Bohumil Hrabal’s six great loves, guess how many were cats? (Hint: almost all of them.) | Lit Hub
• Ian McKellen almost didn’t play Gandalf! David Bowie almost played Lord Elrond! (And other casting intrigues behind The Lord of the Rings.) | Lit Hub Biography
• “Rightly or wrongly, I may content myself that fiction absolves me of some of the responsibility to be true to reality.” Alireza Taheri Araghi on stories of Iran told at a distance. | Lit Hub
• How Nicole Caputo designed the (nearly three-dimensional) cover for Paulina Flores’ Humiliation. | Lit Hub
• “Even as it becomes the background music to American civil society, hip hop is being used to criminalize blackness.” On the storytelling legacies of Jay-Z and Rakim. | Lit Hub Music
• Kerri K. Greenidge on how William Monroe Trotter mobilized black Americans across class lines. | Lit Hub History
• Alan Furst’s Interwar Gems: the legendary spy writer recommends five of his favorites. | Book Marks
• “In Didion’s fiction, the standard narratives of women’s lives are mangled, altered, and rewritten all the time.” Hilton Als on Joan Didion’s early novels of American womanhood. | The New Yorker
• “We have still only seen the first sparks of the fire.” Parul Sehgal on a decade of women’s rage in literature. | The New York Times
• “Other people’s first novels were always going to be coming-of-age stories, and mine was always going to be about divorce.” Taffy Brodesser-Akner on writing about divorce as a still-married person. | Slate
• We’re living in a golden age of sci-fi and fantasy adaptations, as evidenced by this list of (almost) every SFF adaptation currently in the works. | Tor
• “The truth is a constant negotiation between what the individual thinks and feels and what the rest of the world thinks and feels” On Meghan Daum, Wesley Yang, Bret Easton Ellis, and the “liberal backlash to woke culture.” | The New Republic
• America’s early black female journalists spearheaded “a lively, dynamic, insistently visible force for change.” | New York Review of Books
• T Kira Madden, Lara Zarum, and others weigh in on how to get the most out of #NaNoWriMo. | Chicago Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: “Restitution,” a short story by Barry Lopez • On Pauline Kael’s controversial criticism of Citizen Kane • Read from Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s debut novel In Dependence.