LitHub Daily: April 27, 2016

TODAY: In 1667, John Milton sells the copyright to Paradise Lost for ten pounds. 

• Marlon James on soccer, Jesmyn Ward on football, Hanya Yanagihira on hockey: ten writers and the sports they should write about. | Literary Hub
• The other White Flight: when college kids went back to the land. | Literary Hub
• Andrew Solomon talks to Paul Holdengraber about violence, isolationism, and the art of travel. | Literary Hub
• Mythic Scandinavian utopias are a thing of the past: Zinzi Clemmons on why Nordic social democracy cannot solve the world’s problems. | Literary Hub
• Hilton Als on the time-traveling art of Octavia Butler, Cecil Taylor, and Beyoncé. | The New Yorker
• Visiting the other side of paradise: Better understanding F. Scott Fitzgerald through his Midwestern roots. | The New York Times
• 30 years after Chernobyl, reflecting on literature’s attempts at and language’s inadequacy in conveying the immensity of the disaster. | The Atlantic
• “What I saw was Prince seeing women as collaborators, co-workers; they were essential in art and life, and creators in every sense of the word.” Porochista Khakpour on Prince’s women. | The Village Voice
• On the text-based art of Xu Bing, the author of the first emoji novel (and the rise of its successors). | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “It’s always seemed important to me to write moments in time that manage to capture all the layers that we feel at any given moment.” An interview with Paul Lisicky. | Guernica
• Shirley Barrett on translating a feature film script to a book, revered killer whales, and the freedom novel writing affords. | Electric Literature
• Emma Watson’s book club will now be reading The Argonauts, which “rewards us with an expansive way of considering identity, caretaking, and freedom.” | Goodreads

Also on Literary Hub: Secrets of the Book Designer: the many ways a cover is rejected · How mapping Alice Munro’s stories helped me as a writer · Four new poems by Maureen McLane ·LA’s “big one”: from Paul Kolsby & David L. Ulin’s Ear to the Ground

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