LitHub Daily: May 21, 2015

TODAY: In 1908, the movie adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde premieres in Chicago.

• We are very pleased to announce the winners of the O. Henry Prizes for 2015. Read prize-winning stories from Dina Nayeri, Christopher Merkner, Molly Antopol, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. | Literary Hub
• Sausages vs. salamis, Internet love vs. life, bad habits vs. other bad habits: five stories from Lydia Davis. | Five Dials
• Italy is celebrating Dante’s 750^th birthday by creating its own circle of Hell on earth (a nationwide selfie campaign). | The New Yorker
• The new literary avant-garde sees books incorporating and becoming art objects, as well as dissolving the distinction between fiction and reality. | The New Republic
• Apparently, novels are very long now to steel themselves for battle against their natural enemies, Instagram and Vine. | Vulture
• If not through sheer length or the dissolution of its traditional form, the novel can be saved by expansion into genre fiction; The Vorrh will lead this charge. | The Guardian
• “Traffic is a perennial struggle,” “the weed here is not for lightweights,” “beautiful people get away with practically anything,” and other facts you may not know about L.A., excerpted from City by City. | N+1
• “Like Xanther has this cat in her hands at the end of the book, the book is like the cat in people’s hands.” So much depends upon our reading of The Familiar: an interview with Mark Z. Danielewski. | The Rumpus
• Talking with a real estate agent, drug dealer, gallerist, artist, director of a homeless shelter, senator, and more about gentrification—without irony! | The Millions
• The Folio Society has released an illustrated edition of Beloved; artist Joe Morse speaks about making space for the reader to enter through his work. | Flavorwire
• “Unfathomable sorrow, wasn’t an obstacle to be overcome—it was the appropriate response to confronting a tortured, mutilated human.” Finding, and abandoning, Stoicism in a warzone. | Full Stop

 

Also on Literary Hub: The revolt against literary wunderkinds · A wonderful story from César Aira’s recent collections

 

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