LitHub Daily: April 30, 2015

TODAY: In 1859, Charles Dickens’s A Tale Of Two Cities is first published, the best of times ensue. 

• Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation about his debut novel, The Sympathizer, on the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. | Literary Hub
• Over two dozen writers, including Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lorrie Moore, have joined the protest against PEN’s decision to present Charlie Hebdo with the Freedom of Expression Courage award, although it’s unclear who gave them everyone’s email address. | The Guardian, Salon
• In response to the growing controversy, PEN is hosting a panel with Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief, Gérard Biard. | PEN America
• The longlist for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award and the finalists for the California Book Awards have been announced. | The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, SF Gate
• “One of the ways I’d always described the book… was as a piece of ombré cloth: something that began on one end as a bright, light bluish-white, and ended as something so dark it was nearly black.” The images that inspired Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. | Vulture
• Roxane Gay reviews God Help the Child, “the kind of novel where you can feel the magnificence just beyond your reach.” | The Guardian
• Amelia Gray walks through the revision process for her short story “Labyrinth.” | Real Pants
• “What a use to make of his affliction, he’d afterward think, exhausted, yet elated.” A short story by Joyce Carol Oates. | BOMB Magazine
• “I stood at the edge and smoked a cigarette to show that I, like the Colorado River, could destroy something beautiful over time.” Karl Ove Knausgaard reviews America (a parody). | The Toast
• The Norwegian-American festival begins on May 20, will be inaugurated with “Knausgaard’s reunited college band, Lemen, [taking] the stage” (not a parody). | The Paris Review
• “You will always be too Black to be a true Muslim, but you must live with all of the pain that America inflicts on both Black people and Muslims.” On anti-blackness, Islamophobia, and the black Muslim experience. | The New Inquiry
• Have you ever wondered who the real Mr. Darcy was?  Has the most basic of your friends?  Here is your answer. | The Telegraph

 

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