Lit Hub Daily: June 25, 2018

• The Man Booker by the numbers: How many story collections have made the short list? Who’s won it most?  | Lit Hub
• Rick Bass on the time he headed one valley over to cook dinner for his neighbor, Denis Johnson. | Lit Hub
• Lisa Halliday, Rachel Cusk, Zadie Smith, and many more: the best reviewed books of the year (so far). | Book Marks
• Former poet laureate Donald Hall has died at 89. Ann Patchett remembers him as her generous pen pal. | NPR, Literary Hub
• “The quarter-century-old work does something that most political writing cannot do.” Kaitlyn Greenidge on why we should all read Lesie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. | The New York Times
• “Kathy was angry. I mean I. I was angry. And then I got married.” From Olivia Laing’s first novel, Crudo. | Frieze
• “The author is, at the very least, genius-adjacent.” On Helen DeWitt and our endless search for genius. | Public Books
• “Will another sentence come? I wait for it like a birdwatcher, like a lover checking for a reply to a text message. Anything? Anyone?” On writing through pain. | Lit Hub
• From the novels of Jesmyn Ward and James Hanaham to Childish Gambino’s “This is America,” mapping the black Gothic revival. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Likability in fiction isn’t the same as empathy—and sometimes, it prevents it. Joann Luloff can’t relate to relatability. | Lit Hub
• How do we get the USA back to the World Cup? Bruce Arena on the latest setback for American soccer. | Lit Hub
• “Whither their cruelty, their decadence, their way of life?” What the Patrick Melrose novels reveal about the decline of the British aristocracy. | The New Yorker
• David Hirshey remembers Brazil’s epoch-defining defeat to Italy in the 1982 World Cup. | Eight by Eight

Also on Literary Hub: Sexism in the surfing world: Pin-ups first, athletes second · Apocalyptic poetry: Brandon Brown and Claire Marie Stancek in conversation · Read from Alicia Kopf’s Brother in Ice, translated by Mara Faye Lethem