Lit Hub Daily: April 13, 2017

• Race is the original American fiction: on reuniting with the descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves. | Literary Hub
• David Vann is very particular about his writing rituals: “If I miss a single morning it changes my novel.” | Literary Hub
• The lives of the poets aren’t all that cinematic: on A Quiet Passion and Paterson. | Literary Hub
• On the power of the personal essay for first-generation college applicants. | Literary Hub
• Famous writers and the very odd ways in which they died. | Literary Hub
• “This year my mother begins to explain what ‘Democrats’ are and she cries describing ‘assassinations.’” A personal and political history from Lidia Yuknavitch. | Electric Literature
• “When people publish stories about the U.A.E., the country is almost always represented entirely by Dubai, which itself is almost always reduced to a glitzy, two-dimensional backdrop.” On Deepak Unnikrishnan and the rarely told stories of Abu Dhabi. | The New Yorker
• My work is more like dissociative personality disorder: An interview with Max Winter. | Catapult
• “The pleasure of discovery, of surprise, is important.” An interview with Samrat Upadhyay. | Poets & Writers
• How very unfeminine she was, to save his life: Rereading The Paper Bag Princess. | The Hairpin
• If I am not heard . . . I don’t exist. The prison-writing nonprofit Exchange for Change and artist Julia Weist are using the internet to amplify the voices of 110 individuals in correctional institutions in Miami. | Hyperallergic
• A diverse history and nuanced cultural tapestry: 10 books to understand Egypt, from The Cairo Trilogy to American War. | Signature Reads

Also on Lit Hub: Pearl Abraham recalls the family Seder · Interview with a gatekeeper: Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions · Read “The Quiet” from Carys Davies’ new short story collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike.