Lit Hub Daily: June 20, 2017

• Lit Hub Longform: Measuring the decline of America’s first company town, one sidewalk crack at a time… | Literary Hub
• The play’s the thing to catch the conscience of the King President: on the lasting power of the stories we tell on stage. | Literary Hub
• Paul Beatty is tired of being called an “angry” writer. | Literary Hub
• Shorter, leaner, stronger: Olivia Clare on the art of literary compression. | Literary Hub
• Is Jeremy Corbyn the “unlikeliest leader ever?” asks David Graeber (and is that maybe a good thing?). | Literary Hub
• Benjamin Moser talks to Minae Mizumura about the Japanese “I-novel,” the eternal Internet, and the art of aging in print. | Literary Hub
• Loving the monsters too: On Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, one of Australia’s most beloved novels. | Book Marks
• On the intersection of “radical artistic thinking and obscure spiritual strivings” and the occult origins of the modernist movement. | The New Yorker
• “They were towed to shore and charged with the crime of hope.” An excerpt from Blind Spot by Teju Cole. | VICE
• She wrote as an enthusiast and a partisan: On the sexual anxieties and diaries of Susan Sontag. | Bookforum
• Larissa Pham on a new collection of essays by Mary Gaitskill, who “uses compassion as a conduit for interpretation.” | The Nation
• In which Tony Tulathimutte compares writing to “filling a waterbed with the moisture from your sighing.” | The Rumpus
• She knew what kind of subject she wanted to be: On Eve Babitz’s fiction and the line between writer and work. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Revisiting Eve Merriam’s “frighteningly prophetic. . . personal condemnation of an administration,” The Nixon Poems. | The Awl

Also on Lit Hub: On Donald Trump’s cameos throughout American literature · Five Books Making News: widows, war, and weight · “Have You Ever Tried?” by Anna Marschalk-Burns, new fiction from Slice.