LitHub Daily: August 30, 2016

TODAY: In 1797, Mary Shelley, author of the gothic novel Frankenstein, is born. 

• How I helped Elmore Leonard write Get Shorty. | Literary Hub
• DIY, 19th-century style: On the lost art of custom-illustrating your favorite books. | Literary Hub
• What does it mean to be a poet in the face of violence? Adriana Ramirez considers black bodies and the metaphors that can hide them. | Literary Hub
• On the third anniversary of Seamus Heaney‘s death, the Nobel Laureate on William Wordsworth’s one big truth. | Literary Hub
• “People are always trying to push me off the literary scene, and to hell with it.” A profile of Ursula Le Guin on the occasion of her publication by the Library of America. | The New York Times
• Eimear McBride on deciding she was a writer, the impact of her acting training on her craft, and dealing with James Joyce comparisons. | The Guardian
• “What a fucking scenario this is, huh?” A short story by Jonathan Lethem. | The New Yorker
• “If you write, and you are really alone (writing is a lonely thing), you learn to be alone without suffering.” An interview with Alejandro Zambra. | The Rumpus
• “I come from a family of story collectors, rather than storytellers.” On the second edition of Freeman’s. | The Australian
• “Okay, she said. You have Ovid. And the cat in diapers. And the duck. Those are your loves. Okay. Maybe that’s all you need. Who knows?” An excerpt from Jane Alison’s Nine Island. | Virginia Quarterly Review
• “When you tell the truth, there’s beauty in that, no matter what the truth is.” An interview with Kristin Hersh. | Soundcloud
• The Brooklyn Book Festival has announced its schedule, as well as its Bookend and Children’s Day | Brooklyn Book Festival

Also on Literary Hub: Spread the word: on small presses and the fight for publicity · Books making news this week: memoirs, monographs, and media · Butt kissing at daycare: From Kaui Hart Hemmings’s How to Party With an Infant

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