LitHub Daily: January 24, 2017

TODAY:  In 1891, Caresse Crosby, co-founder of the Black Sun Press and “literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris,” is born.

• “There’s nothing crime fiction can’t do.” In conversation with Ian Rankin. | Literary Hub
• Roxane Gay on empathy, representation, and the brilliance of Alice Childress. | Literary Hub
• On the occasion of her birthday, everything there is to know about Edith Wharton’s deep love of dogs. | Literary Hub
• Camille T. Dungy on feeling unwelcome in her own country, and at her own church. | Literary Hub
• Finding much needed hope in this year’s ALA award-winning children’s books. | Literary Hub
• “It isn’t Trump as a character, a human type—the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist—that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.” Philip Roth on Donald Trump. | The New Yorker
• “On some level, I think most writers consider their work to be political, if only in the sense of it creating empathy through narrative, through characters.” A conversation with Melissa Febos and Garth Greenwell. | Slice Magazine
• Protests run on words as well as actions: On the writers protestors turned to in the Women’s March and the future of literature under the current administration. | Times Literary Supplement
• “I felt stuck in the quicksand of a crossroads, and felt I needed to read up on love for direction. I came across—and was forever changed by—bell hooks’s All About Love.” Ibram X. Kendi on the book that changed his life. | Public Books
• Works of fiction that consider the US-Mexico border, from 2666 to Signs Preceding the End of the World. | Signature Reads
• “Do you worry that what you write is too fantastical, exaggerated, dream-like?” In which Laurie Sheck interviews herself. | Rain Taxi
• The winners of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction & Nonfiction and ALA Notable Books List have been announced. | American Library Association

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