LitHub Daily: June 9, 2016

TODAY: In 1870, Charles Dickens dies, leaving his serialized final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. Audiences were so upset a mock trial for the fictional main suspect was held, with G. K. Chesterton playing judge and George Bernard Shaw playing jury foreman. 

• Max Porter and Catherine Lacey discuss death, writing, and musical theater. | Literary Hub
• On the origins of Diane Arbus’s most famous photograph. | Literary Hub
• They found a meth lab in Cole Porter‘s childhood home, and other tales of those who dared leave Indiana. | Literary Hub
• A Muhammad Ali reading list featuring David Remnick, George Plimpton, Gerald Early, and more. | Literary Hub
• Exciting, affordable, and freaking art people: Whitney Terrell on five reasons why writers should move to Kansas City. | Literary Hub
• Lisa Mcinnerney’s debut novel The Glorious Heresies has won the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. | The Baileys Prize
• “I thought, I just I have to quit until my money runs out … I’m going just to sit down and do nothing but work on this book, and I’m going to finish it in a month.” Helen DeWitt recalls writing The Last Samurai. | The Paris Review
• “[I]f you want to write novels, well, it’s understandable to hope you might write a good one. But why does it have to be an American one?” An interview with John Irving. | Hazlitt
• On two new works of “fabular father-son fiction,” Inherited Disorders and Grief is the Thing with Feathers. | The New Republic
• “In my mind Ruth will always be wincing in the kitchen, squeezing lemons. I will always be watching.” A short story by Anna Noyes. | Electric Literature
• Rebecca Schiff on using language as her engine, being a feminist and being a fiction writer, and imagining a surreal version of “Hot or Not.” | The Rumpus
• “How do you write about being a caretaker without damaging the caring relationship? How can you convey the realities of that work without undoing some of it?” On the new collection of essays by Sallie Tisdale. | The New Yorker
• Christina MacSweeney on her ongoing love affair with Latin American literature, collaborating through music as well as text, and the stereotype of “magical” fiction. | Words Without Borders
• The ferryman is dead: An excerpt from Saša Stanišić’s Before the Feast. | Tin House

Also on Literary Hub: The Grumpy Librarian: picks for strange worlds and rare birds · At the Bay Area Book Festival: a report from Jane Ciabattari in three acts · A story from Katie Chase’s collection Man & Wife, “Refugees“

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