LitHub Daily: January 19, 2017

TODAY:  In 1921, novelist Patricia Highsmith is born.

• The finalists for the 2017 PEN Literary Awards have been announced. | PEN America
• “I read my poem, feeling American poets alive and dead by my side, feeling myself as representative in the most grave and beautiful way.” Elizabeth Alexander on composing and reciting a poem for Obama’s first Inauguration. | The New Yorker
• Listen to me if you know what’s good for you: An advance look at Han Kang’s Human Acts. | Read it Forward
• “What I call for is a literature that craves the conflict and owns the destruction, a split-mind literature that features fear and handles shock, that keeps self-evident ‘reality’ safely within the quotation marks.” Aleksandar Hemon on writing in the age of Trump. | The Village Voice
• “Those people who believe themselves to be beyond identity and ideology will, sooner or later, charge us with identity and ideology if we dare to commit that most unnatural act of speaking up and out.” An excerpt from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies. | BLARB
• “There is an art to dying and the boy does not have it — never mind he has been dying since first he was born.” A short story by Chanelle Benz. | Electric Literature
• Twice a year, the just-announced Full Stop Reviews Supplement will “feature some of the best reviews of debuts, works in translation, and books published by small presses” from their website. | Full Stop

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