LitHub Daily: July 8, 2016

TODAY: In 1913, French writer Louis Hemon (pictured here in Péribonka, Quebec) dies after being struck by a train. 

• Walking while black: Garnette Cadogan on the realities of being black in America. | Literary Hub
• We need to keep writing (and talking) about these endless wars: J. Kael Weston on the importance of Iraqi and Afghan stories. | Literary Hub
• Reading the future of Cuba in its abandoned National Art Schools: on space, history, and building a revolution on a golf course. | Literary Hub
• Why spiritualism persists in our fictions and culture. | Literary Hub
• How I learned to stop checking my book’s sales: on the anxiety of literary fame. | Literary Hub
• “it doesn’t feel like a time to write/when all my muses are begging/for their lives.” A poem by Danez Smith. | BuzzFeed Reader
• Writers reflect on phenomena that represent the American spirit: Karan Mahajan on small talk, Hua Hsu on Guy Fieri, Ottessa Moshfegh on coyotes, Emma Cline on Archie comics, and Heidi Julavits on ice. | The New Yorker
• “We cannot attribute natural features to the lines we design just as we cannot attribute natural causes to those dying as they try to cross them.” Susana Moreira Marques responds to photographer Wolf Böwig’s project Borders and Beyond. | Tin House
• Sarah Howe on how being in the U.S. unsettles her perception of language, venturing into the “first-personal,” and dwelling on pronouns. | The Boston Review
• “Beckett came to believe failure was an essential part of any artist’s work, even as it remained their responsibility to try to succeed.” On the artistic failings (and successes) of Samuel Beckett. | The Guardian
• Why Elie Wiesel deserves a biography that “continue[s] to bear witness to what he saw.” | Signature Reads
• Alexander Chee, Jenny Han, and J. Courtney Sullivan recommend summer reading. | Vulture

Also on Literary Hub: Bob Shacochis: how surfing lead me to writing · Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer discusses his newly translated novel · Light fails: From Atef Abu Saif’s The Drone Eats With Me

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