Lit Hub Daily: May 16, 2018

• The best stories of the year: announcing the 2018 O. Henry Prize winners. | Lit Hub
• 12 Palestinian writers and artists reflect on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. | Lit Hub
• How Kristen Arnett runs library storytime without boring kids to death (or suffering a nervous breakdown). | Lit Hub
• Rereading Little Women in its 150th anniversary year. | Lit Hub
• “My favorite critics draw deeply from life and share their own experience, and explore the connections between life and literature.” An interview with book critic David Varno. | Book Marks
• How crime writer Elmore Leonard first honed his literary skill with gritty Westerns. | CrimeReads
• Researchers have uncovered two hidden pages—containing dirty jokes and “sexual matters,” as well as a burgeoning literary sensibility—in Anne Frank’s diary. | The New York Times
• “I don’t know why Ramadan is the act of faith which has endured for me.” Hanif Abdurraqib on continuing to fast during Ramadan, despite no longer considering himself a practicing Muslim. | BuzzFeed Reader
• How the USSR “used translation to build ties between Moscow and oppressed peoples across the world,” and what was misconstrued (or invented) in the Soviet poetry anthology “Africa in America.” | The Paris Review
• “I don’t want boys to be deprived of roses and lip gloss any more than I want to be deprived of reading Marx.” An interview with poet and essayist Anne Boyer. | Mythos
• On David Foster Wallace, Georg Cantor, and the difficulty of writing about abstract mathematical ideas. | Lit Hub
• “I looked out and saw myself spread over the landscape like a coat of paint or butter.” Michael Pollan talks his own experience with psychedelics and their therapeutic efficacy. | NPR
• The Arch Mission Foundation and Astrobiotic are planning to send a microfiche library to the moon, where it should last for millions of years. | TechCrunch
• “Behold the lopsided ears! Behold the scraggly coat! Behold the lolling tongue, the malformed limb, the crooked tail!” On the poetics of Petfinder. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub: Reading modern Japan’s greatest novelist Natsume Sōseki‘s bitingly critical first novel, I Am a Cat • In praise of the book-gif: why the world of literature should use motion as a communication tool • Read from Todd Robert Petersen’s It Needs to Look Like We Tried