Lit Hub Daily: January 16, 2019

• “I still believe that the best things a novel can do are through its minuteness, its parochialism.” Tessa Hadley on what it is to write about everyday life. | Lit Hub
• “The idea of landscape in this country is so tied up with the idea of dominion.” Lauren Groff and Rachel Kushner talk prisons, prairies, and power. | Lit Hub
• How to live like Susan Sontag, genius maker of lists. | Lit Hub
• “I can’t separate the smell of food from the language of my family.” A reading series that mixes poetry and food. | Lit Hub
• “As I remake myself as a reader, I’m relearning what kind of stories matter to me.” On rediscovering reading after grad school nearly destroyed it. | Lit Hub
• New poetry by DaMaris Hill, from her collection A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing. | Lit Hub
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers on the literary canon, Canterbury Tales, and Kayleb Rae Candrilli. | Book Marks
• “I didn’t tell anyone what had happened for decades.” Christopher Yates remembers growing up with a psychopathic neighbor in early 1980s England. | CrimeReads
• “If I was waiting for confidence to write, I’d still be waiting.” Read an interview with Roxane Gay. | gal-dem
• “It was difficult emotionally. And it required me to stretch my comfort zone way past where I normally do.” Carmen Maria Machado on her forthcoming memoir In the Dream House. | EW
• Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, withdrew from the Emirates Festival of Literature amid calls for the UAE to free human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor. | The Bookseller
• “To be intrigued by more than plot and character, by the language of the writing itself, was the beginning of my slow awakening to the power of writing.” Lydia Davis on Jon dos Passos. | The Paris Review
• Film director Peter Greenaway plans to create a racetrack art installation in tribute to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. | The Guardian
• “Book publishing has a fact-checking problem.” What the critiques of Jill Abramson’s forthcoming book tell us about a larger problem in the publishing industry. | Vox
• The Andrew W. Mellon foundation has awarded a $2.2 million grant to the Academy of American Poets. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Literary Disco on Tarzan of the Apes • Read from Adèle