LitHub Daily: February 17, 2016

TODAY: In 1955, Nobel Laureate and author of Red Sorghum Clan, Mo Yan, is born.

• Belinda McKeon on the night that Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes, (at a literary launch party, 60 years ago this week). | Literary Hub
• Lisa Levy on love, stalking, satire, and the crime fiction of Caroline Kepnes. | Literary Hub
• Jhumpa Lahiri talks to Paul Holdengraber about language, nostalgia, and being the child of immigrants.| Literary Hub
• Fascinated, not alienated: On the “radiant, concentrated” and underrated work of Dana Spiotta. | T Magazine
• “I didn’t have a sense if it was one kind of long poem, or if it was several little poems, or if it was garbage.” Ben Lerner reflects on The Lichtenberg Figures. | The Paris Review
• “I like writing that knows what writing is for.” Elisa Gabbert on overripe and underwritten poetry and prose. | The Smart Set
• Far-seeing in matters of both business and taste: On the small but storied experimental publishing house New Directions. | The New Yorker
• “The idea was: It could work for everyone.” A new literary/graphic project reflecting on the pre-broadband Internet launched yesterday with a piece by Paul Ford. | Web Safe 2k16
• A review of the articles in the new, semi-clothed Playboy, which includes a case study of modern sexuality by Bret Easton Ellis and a “a rambling slice of life” by Karl Ove Knausgaard. | Vanity Fair
• How can we be so cruel to such a fundamental part of writing? Isolating and honoring the punctuation of famous novels. | Medium
• Who needs James Bond when you have Jonathan Franzen? Daniel Craig has signed on to star in a TV adaptation of Purity. | The Bookseller

Also on Literary Hub: 30 books in 30 days: Counting down the NBCC finalists with Carmela Ciuaru on Colm Toibin’s On Elizabeth Bishop · Emily Harnett on the elusive consolations of the death memoir · From Eleanor Perényi’s reissued More Was Lost.

---