LitHub Daily: March 30, 2016

TODAY: In 1967, Jean Toomer, poet and author of Cane, dies. 

• Finally, a March Madness bracket about erotic writing: The First-Annual Tournament of Literary Sex Writing. | Literary Hub
• Unexpected joy in a dark moviehouse: Karan Mahajan watches Satyajit Ray in New York. | Literary Hub
• Who can fictionalize slavery? Katy Simpson Smith on writing across time and race. | Literary Hub
• Paul Holdengraber and Eric Jarosinski, the man behind Nein Quarterly, continue their call about the philosophy of Twitter. | Literary Hub
• The 2015 VIDA count, examining representation of race and ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and ability in literary publications, has been published. | VIDA
• Ottessa Moshfegh on ancient narrative texts, Google alerts, and cynically writing pathetic men. | Literary Bennington
• Grime, boredom, and terror: On Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s memoir about fighting in the Spanish Civil War. | Signature Reads
• The Firecracker Awards longlist, the Lukas Prize winners and finalists, and the Young Lions Fiction Award finalists have been announced. | CLMP, Columbia Journalism School, NYPL
• A profile of Arlene Heyman, whose debut collection Scary Old Sex unflinchingly depicts “frank tales of conjugal relations among the old.” | The New Yorker
• On the rise of “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun, featuring all the usual suspects (The Argonauts, Tumblr, Girls). | The New York Times
• “In a country where free speech was being actively targeted by a minority of violent fundamentalists, the Dhaka Lit Fest was gleefully wearing a bull’s-eye on its back.” Attending a literary festival in Bangladesh after the violent attacks on publishers and bloggers. | VICE
• What not to miss at AWP (old-timey typewriters, pedagogical philosophy, your ex). | Electric Literature

Also on Literary Hub: Librarian Confidential: Sophie Brookover on why libraries are the hearths of their communities · Saying goodbye to Mad Madge: Bethanne Patrick in conversation with Danielle Dutton · A poem from David Tomas Martinezs · Family matters: from Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie

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