Lit Hub Daily: February 28, 2017

• Tim Denevi, five feet from Steve Bannon, finds Orwell at CPAC. | Literary Hub
• Failure and patience: lessons from the garden for frustrated writers. | Literary Hub
• Rowan Hisayo Buchanan would much rather spend time with flawed characters. | Literary Hub
• Lauren Elkin on the origins of May 1968, and the fine tradition of Parisian protest. | Literary Hub
• 10 great works of New Orleans lit, for Mardi Gras. | Literary Hub
• Motherfucker I AM music: A short story by Zadie Smith. | The New Yorker
• “My first intention was to write a book that could be summed up in five words: woman investigates her brother’s suicide.” An interview with Patty Yumi Cottrell. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• It’s hard to defend doing anything except being in the streets: On the value of cultural criticism, even in Trump’s America. | The New Republic
• “Every bedroom was empty except for the smell of gasoline and a small crackling fire set directly in the middle of each bed, as if a demented Girl Scout had been camping there.” An excerpt from Celeste Ng’s forthcoming novel, Little Fires Everywhere. | Entertainment Weekly
• Poet Layli Long Soldier on prayer, Lakota language, and embracing the unseen. | The Creative Independent
• “isn’t love to say I made room/in my body for your body?” Three poems by Danez Smith. | The Lifted Brow
• “The poems play on the essential themes of the app—relationships, our increasingly unsympathetic world and quite a lot of sex.” A statement from Grindr’s first poet-in-residence, Max Wallis. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Sarah Weinman on a groundbreaking memoir of murder and grief · Five Books Making News: Brexit, blacklists, and biographies · From Dead Letters, Caite Dolan-Leach’s debut suspense novel.