Lit Hub Daily: September 6, 2017

• Am I a teacher, or a writer? Kyoki Mori struggles with the divided self. | Literary Hub
• On the miracles of Serena Williams: black sainthood won’t fix white America. | Literary Hub
• 10 literary college courses we’d audit if we could. | Literary Hub
• Stop using violence and abuse as a plot device: Rene Denfield calls for more complexity in our treatment of victims. | Literary Hub
• For most women, beauty is experienced as pain: A reading list from Sofi Oksanen. | Literary Hub
• Hilton Als on the poetry of Frank Bidart, who “presents a queer self who resents being looked at through straight eyes, even as he demands that we all witness his voice, at least on the page.” | The New Yorker
• I thought you might like a little intelligent conversation for a change: A short story by N.K. Jemisin. | Uncanny
• On two recent memoirs by Obama-era staffers, which “serve as a more devastating indictment of the current administration than a campaign-style book ever could.” | The New Republic
• “If everything is political then maybe I don’t like political poetry. I want protest poetry.” Christopher Soto on politics and poetics. | Poetry Foundation
• The new issue of Oxford American, featuring work by Kaveh Akbar, Frederick McKindra, and more, is now available. | Oxford American
• Casey Affleck will star as the titular character in the film adaptation of John Williams’ beloved, “beautiful but not well-known” Stoner. | Variety
• Gary Shteyngart, Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie, and others share six-word memoirs about the immigrant experience. | BuzzFeed
• Playing with elements of profanity, pornography and lewd illustration: A 1984 review of Kathy Acker’s metafictional and highly controversial novel, Blood and Guts in High School. | Book Marks

Also on Lit Hub: On the writers behind Cormac McCarthy’s modern classic, Blood Meridian ·  John Le Carré, Jesmyn Ward, Lily Tuck, and more · Read from Nathan Englander’s new novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth.