LitHub Daily: September 28, 2015

TODAY: In 1970, John Dos Passos, a “Lost Generation” writer and author of the U.S.A. trilogy, dies. 

• Exploring Patrick Modiano’s melancholy fiction and his Paris. | Literary Hub
• A numeric history of the officially octogenarian Penguin Books. | T Magazine
• “What do any of these words mean?” Alice Notley discusses prosody, poetic voices, and the garble. | BOMB Magazine
• Fan letter turned friendship turned flirtation: The sitcom of Eudora Welty’s and Ross MacDonald’s not-quite-romantic relationship. | The Paris Review
• On the mysterious death and lasting influence of Walter Benjamin, forefather of today’s overly intellectual TV bloggers. | The Guardian
• You’ll claw yourself (with pleasure?): A compelling take on book blurbs. | NPR
• “I have an impulse to wallow in bullshit.” Patrick deWitt on intimacy, irony, and the Internet. | BuzzFeed
• Romeo is bae: A new “translation” of Shakespeare will make his plays immediately understandable to the modern reader. | The Wall Street Journal
• Baby names, cemeteries, and population statistics: Helen Phillips enumerates the sources of inspiration for The Beautiful Bureaucrat. | Necessary Fiction

Also on Literary Hub: Why teaching (writing) matters · Inside the francophile’s dream bookstore, Albertine · Does Descartes, “one of the greatest men who ever lived,” hold the key to How the French Think?

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