Lit Hub Daily: July 25, 2017

• Which White House had the worst food ever? (Worse, even, than charred steak with ketchup.) | Literary Hub
• How the uncanny witchcraft of Clarice Lispector saved my life. | Literary Hub
• As a writer, you have to decide what you’re going to do with the truth. | Literary Hub
• The time Haruki Murakami met Raymond Carver (and other adorable literary meet-cutes). | Literary Hub
• Reading aloud with others is more important than you think. | Literary Hub
• Enough with the bro-canon: on the radical potential of queer road novels. | Literary Hub
• “Capitalism is to Rooney’s young women what Catholicism was to Joyce’s young men, a rotten national faith to contend with.” On Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends. | Book Marks
• Springsteen and Dylan speak to our current condition, and so do Boethius and Sappho: On Michael Robbins’s Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music and “advanced-pop criticism.” | The New Yorker
• “During a trip to California I convinced myself that a stranger’s damp, blue eyes had originally belonged to my dad.” Samantha Hunt on mourning and organ donation. | Work In Progress
• The Frick has announced a new series of small books that will pair artists and writers with pieces from their collection (beginning with Hilary Mantel, James Ivory, and Edmund de Waal). | The New York Times
• “When I read a translation, the experience is often similar to reading an Oulipan text—it follows unknown rules, held up by a hidden central axis.” An interview with translator Megan McDowell. | The Paris Review
• Another overdose, another librarian at the ready: Responding to opioid overdoses in libraries. | Catapult
• “I should note that I am what is termed a cartographic specialist in the art history world—and a dilettante in the world of cartographers.” An excerpt from Impossible Views of the World by Lucy Ives. | Granta
• “We caught a gent last Christmas with £400-worth of stolen books in his trousers and elsewhere. We grabbed all of the bags back, but he returned about half an hour later to reclaim a half-bottle of whisky and his dream journal.” Booksellers on their experiences with thieves. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Helen Ellis talks to Sarah Hall about marriage, secrets, and housewives turned beast · Five Books Making News This Week: mothers, memoirs, and military women · Read from Ninni Holmqvist’s new novel, The Unit.