Lit Hub Daily: May 30, 2017

• Rebecca Solnit on the loneliness of Donald Trump. | Literary Hub
• On surviving (barely) the jargon-riddled hothouse of grad school.  | Literary Hub
• Scott Gould finished a collection of stories about his small South Carolina hometown and the very next day the floodwaters came. | Literary Hub
• That rarest of literary figures, the female Beat: On Diane di Prima’s sex-filled Memoirs of a Beatnik. | Literary Hub
• What counts as standard? John McWhorter and Kia Corthron in conversation about Black English and Black American Sign Language. | Literary Hub
• Celebrating 20 years of Cave Canem, with Walter Mosley, Elizabeth Alexander, and more.  | Literary Hub
• “Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission.” Jill Lepore on the uninspiring politics of contemporary dystopic literature. | The New Yorker
• “Smoldering antihero” Jon Hamm narrates the audio version of Walt Whitman’s long-lost (and recently found) novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. | The Washington Post
• “You can’t possibly think that a human feeling is anything more than information, electrical currents, controllable under the correct circumstances.” An excerpt from Catherine Lacey’s forthcoming novel The Answers. | VICE
• On the possible abolishment of the NEA and NEH, and the American “antipathy to state-funded art.” | The New Republic
• “I’m still interested in my failures—in them most of all.” An interview with Kate Zambreno. | The Brooklyn Rail
• “No real person will ever match the image that I or a reader have in our minds.” Elena Ferrante weighs in on the My Brilliant Friend TV adaptation. | The New York Times
• Words Without Borders has launched a new education program, WWB Campus, that seeks to “connect students and educators to eye-opening contemporary literature from across the globe.” | Words Without Borders

Also on Lit Hub: 5 crime must-reads this June: dead kids, missing kids, and crooked cops · 5 books making news: dinosaurs, dissidents, and Denis Johnson · Read “The Hotel,” from Véronique Bizot’s short story collection, Gardeners.