LitHub Daily: August 10, 2015

TODAY: In 1955, City Lights Books publishes its first book, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World. 

• A decade after Hurricane Katrina, a reading list of fiction and nonfiction from, by, and about the people of the Gulf Coast. | Literary Hub
• Kathleen Alcott reflects on “the poverty and itinerancy of [her] childhood” and having stairs for the first time. | BuzzFeed
• Elena Ferrante’s letter clarifying why she refuses to come forward publicly: “I’ve already done enough for this long story: I wrote it.” | London Review Bookshop
• A free e-book version of Encyclical on Capitalism & Inequality by Pope Francis, Brooklyn’s hottest new author. | Verso Books, Brooklyn Magazine
• Places built on lies and kept up by blind eyes: not belonging in the suburbs of Judy Blume and Karolina Waclawiak. | Electric Literature
• Compulsively readable and dazzlingly imaginative! On the seriousness with which David Foster Wallace approached the much-maligned book blurb. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• More Lana Del Rey than Sylvia Plath: on Cate Marvin’s dark, intense, and playful Oracle. | The Rumpus
• The lost story of a meet cute: the recently uncovered account of one woman’s encounter with the 72-year-old W.B. Yeats at a meeting of the Sex Education Society. | The Guardian
• Jerk ancestors handing down jerk faces: on the privilege of writing and passing along knowledge, hungering for obscured histories, and Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. | Hazlitt

Also on Literary Hub: Starting a bookstore in a Chandleresque industrial town-turned-biotech and digital startup industrial park: an interview with DIESEL · Public domain books for hot weather week: the hottest of the hot, Dante’s Inferno

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