LitHub Daily: April 12, 2016

TODAY: In 1857, Madame Bovary is published, causing women across Europe to reconsider their marriages. 

• Justin Tussing on fandom, obsession, and collating badly printed images of Xena, Warrior Princess. | Literary Hub
• Why my novel uses untranslated Chinese: Esmé Weijun Wang on the value of not-knowing. | Literary Hub
• This violent world: lessons in coping from the writing of Aleksandar Hemon. | Literary Hub
• The time Ben Warner almost died on the Appalachian Trail. | Literary Hub
• The PEN Award winners (including Mia Alvar,  Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rick Barot) and the L.A. Times Book Prize winners (including Valeria Luiselli, Andrea Wulf, and Chigozie Obioma) have been announced, as has the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist. | PEN America, LA Times, BWPFF
• 95 Mississippi writers, including John Grisham, Donna Tartt, and Kiese Laymon, have signed a letter calling for the repeal of the anti-LGBTQ House Bill 1523. | Jackson Free Press
• Hilton Als speaks with Maggie Nelson, “the poet who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious; the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale.” | The New Yorker
• “Figured it’d been a while, so he’d fill in/for the other old crusty white croutons/who ran out of nice flowers to muse on.” Franny Choi, Ali Eteraz, and other writers respond to Calvin Trillin’s “doggerel.” | AAWW
• Why is Karl Ove Knausgaard so damn sad? On Book Five of My Struggle. | The New Republic
• “From a really young age, I trained myself to write my own hope.” An interview with Augusten Burroughs. | Lambda Literary
• Chris Jackson, editor of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mat Johnson, and Jay Z, has been named the vice president, publisher and editor-in-chief of Random House’s soon-to-relaunch One World imprint. | The New York Times
• “The integrity and honesty of the poem, which will stare back at you from the same distance no matter how successful you are, is the only true measure of value.” On poetry, payments, and the prize economy. | Harriet

Also on Literary Hub: Otto Penzler’s five crime picks for April · Books making news this week: poets, pretensions, and burglaries · The new religion: from Ros Barber’s Devotion

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