LitHub Daily: April 26, 2016

TODAY: In 1914, Bernard Malamud is born. 

• Summer Brennan attempts Marie Kondo’s approach to tidying up her library, learns the heartbreaking difficulty of getting rid of books. | Literary Hub
• Sad books that rip your soul to pieces, and why we love reading to cry. | Literary Hub
• A prodigal daughter returns to Dublin: “Mr. Salary,” a short story by Sally Rooney from Granta’s New Irish Writing issue. | Literary Hub
• George Plimpton, the original master of none: from the ice rink to the boxing ring to the ballpark, a writer who tried it all. | Literary Hub
• How Sylvia Plath’s rare honors thesis helped me understand my divided self. | Literary Hub
• Finding the ghosts of Detroit on Google Maps: A profile of debut author Angela Flournoy. | BuzzFeed Books
• “The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.” A short story by Alexandra Kleeman. | The New Yorker
• “I refuse to wear a mask before my readers. That kind of writing is a waste of trees. Why cut down a tree to put on a mask?” An interview with Robin Coste Lewis. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• First comes love, then comes marriage, and at last comes dentistry: A short story by Amelia Gray. | Catapult
• The history and future of New Directions, from Ezra Pound’s advice to “do something useful” on. | Asymptote
• “Here is a character flaw, my industry origin story: I have always responded positively to negging.” On working in Silicon Valley. | n+1
• “I’ve always thought of translation as a conversation in which you only discover what language you were speaking after the conversation ends.” An interview with Rowan Ricardo Phillips. | Words Without Borders
• Neither adolescent contrarianism nor camp, and certainly not diva worship: Rumaan Alam on his very sincere love of Yoko Ono. | The Millions

Also on Literary Hub: Connections in a disconnected space: photographing the Mexico-US border wall · Books making new this week: outer space, C.D. Wright, and fake Steve Jobs · At the border: from Miroslav Penkov’s Stork Moutain

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