Lit List: Friday October 7, 2016

Ursula Le Guin (Source: Wikipedia)

Good evening readers. Here's today's round-up of the must-read literary news, commentary and fiction.

• Nothing Can Be Done: For Anuk Arudpragasam, research wasn't the be-all and end-all in the writing of his Sri Lankan civil war-era novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage. Los Angeles Review of Books
• Early Book Praising Hitler May Have Been Written By Hitler: A 1923 biography of the Nazi leader that praised his leadership skills was in all likelihood ghostwritten by its subject. The New York Times
• How To Suffer Well: The poems in Four Reincarnations, the last collection published by Max Ritvo before his death, have titles like "When I Criticize You, I'm Just Trying to Criticize the Universe". BOMB Magazine
• Ursula Le Guin Has Stopped Writing Fiction But We Need Her More Than Ever: "The more women tell the truth, the less men want to hear it," Le Guin says. The Nation
• Every Body Goes Haywire: A writer watches her mother experience chronic pain before developing it herself. N+1
• ‘The most impure tale ever written’: how The 120 Days of Sodom became a ‘classic’: From an unpublishable work of obscenity to a Penguin Classic. The Guardian
• Natashia Deón may be the hardest-working debut novelist in Los Angeles: The lawyer turned writer brought her hard-won professional wisdom that "there is no justice" to her first book. The Los Angeles Times
• The First Post-Brexit Novel: Mohsin Hamid's Exit West: In the latest by the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a young couple flees a city that is physically collapsing around them. Lithub
• Alone in Berlin fans will be satisfied with the newly translated Hans Fallada: An autobiographical novel on the "exhaustion and despair" of post-Third Reich Germany makes its debut in English. The New Statesman