Friday Feast: Just Say No, On Poverty in Literature, the Writing Lessons of Hamilton, Risky Writing, and Why We Don’t Italicize Spanish

10470324244_9233ca1cb7_b

Image source: Ritesh Nayak

This week, we learn why creatives who say no are the most productive. (So hard to do in reality.) We also dig in to the representations of poverty in literature, the writing lessons of Hamilton, and one author’s perspective on the italicization of non-English words in fiction. And to give all those novelists out there a fright, one author shares two versions of the time her “mother-in-law stopped speaking to [her] because she was so appalled by the graphic sexual content of the book”  — one funny and one true.