LitHub Daily: July 13, 2016

TODAY: In 2014, South African writer and political activist Nadine Gordimer, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, dies. 

• “Why not use this moment to celebrate writers of color?” Ben H. Winters on the African-American mystery writers who’ve influenced him. | Literary Hub
• How we praise the mutilated world: on the poetry of Ross Gay, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Alan Shapiro, and Paisley Rekdal. | Literary Hub
• “I found a rare copy of June Allison Gibbons’ outsider novel.” On the unusual case of the infamous “Silent Twins” and their literary aspirations. | Literary Hub
• “For black children, innocence is snatched away too soon, a brutal initiation into a frigid world.” Nicole Dennis-Benn on privilege, innocence, and how parents protect their children. | Electric Literature
• “If love belongs to the poet, and fear to the novelist, then loneliness belongs to the photographer.” Hanya Yanagihara on The Lonely City and what photography alone can capture. | The New Yorker
• Alex Mar on the new biography of and Met exhibit honoring Diane Arbus, “an artist who’s long been distorted by a cult of personality.” | The Cut
• “We’re on an uncomfortable tightrope between a bold new dialogue about women and sex, and the monetisation of that conversation by powers that recognise that as a gap in the market.” On a new wave of confessional, “feminist” memoirs. | The Guardian
• Solmaz Sharif on nearness vs. similarity, suffocating language, and existing in imagination. | The Rumpus
• “There are these dualities that people who experience and participate and belong or don’t belong to multiple cultures live with constantly and internalize and are probably not even conscious of all the time.” An interview with Patricia Engel. | The Chicago Review of Books
• Not right for our girl: A short story by Alison B. Hart. | Joyland
• Robert Moor recommends the types of books to bring (and burn) on an extended hiking trip. | Powell’s

Also on Literary Hub: Starting your own religion is easy: Elizabeth Kelly offers a few tips on founding a fictional church · Nico Muhly likes deadlines: the celebrated composer takes a phone call from Paul Holdengraber. · A certain delirium: From Rikki Ducornet’s Brightfellow

---