Lit Hub Weekly: August 28 - September 1, 2017

• The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize shortlist has been announced. | The Center for Fiction
• Whether George Smiley can match up to our deranged political times is another question altogether: On John le Carré’s first novel in 25 years. | The New Republic
• “The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do with any actual person.” Hilary Mantel on Princess Diana, who died 20 years ago this week. | The Guardian
• YA Book Twitter has uncovered a vast conspiracy involving “multiple obscure celebrities from the early-2000s,” an “infamous piece of Harry Potter fan fiction,” and the New York Times best-seller list. | Entertainment Weekly
• In which Chelsea Martin uses promoting her book as “an opportunity to confront Scott McClanahan about a few things.” | Fanzine
• “The things I used to feel for broke off and became simply things I would look at when I had to look at something.” Short fiction by Ottessa Moshfegh. | Lenny
• On Rabindranath Tagore, the actual first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the erasure of Indian writers. | Overland
• “White colleagues routinely. . . called me lucky. They meant that Southern black boys like me were more likely to end up incarcerated than working beside wonderful white faculty at so-called elite liberal arts colleges.” Kiese Laymon on “luck,” privilege, and power. | BuzzFeed Reader
• How Olivia Sudjic’s novel Sympathy and the Aubrey Plaza-starring Ingrid Goes West “demonstrate [that] Instagram relies on a feedback loop of self-absorption.” | Broadly
• “If a writer is nothing, does nothing, and has nothing to say, what can he write about?” On the work of Fernando Pessoa (and his many fictional alter egos). | The New Yorker
• On the essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, “who could do more in six words than any Hemingway type, including Hemingway.” | Bookforum
• “I’ve felt that all my writing is about complicating received narratives—because I grew up with so many.” Will Chancellor in conversation with Nick Laird. | BOMB
• The new issue of the Evergreen Review is now online, featuring work from Helen DeWitt, Robert Coover, and more. | Evergreen Review
• “This dried roach once swam in a cabbage stew that I ate at the counter of a railroad station.” A newly translated sketch by Anton Chekhov. | The Paris Review
• Poetry, too, is pivoting to video: On Button Poetry’s performance-based approach to publishing poetry. | Publishers Weekly
• Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog—originally a fun-loving amphibian that the alt-right appropriated as a mascot of sorts—has successfully prevented the distribution of a children’s book entitled Pepe and Pede that “espoused racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes.” | The New York Times

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