LitHub Daily: August 10, 2016

TODAY: In 1953, poet Mark Doty is born. 

• To all the characters I’ve killed off who haunt me still… Stuart Nadler remembers the darlings he’s drowned. | Literary Hub
• Eating carrion and writing under the midnight sun at the Icelandic writers retreat. | Literary Hub
• Werner Herzog on the books that every filmmaker should read; part two of his conversation with Paul Holdengraber. | Literary Hub
• Plots are ghostly things in our brains: On the role of plot in a literary work, featuring a timeline (from the creation story to cyberpunk) and literature’s worst endings. | Vulture
• “I want to affirm the work of writers that have the burden of feeling like a publisher doesn’t know how to market them, how to talk about them, how to ‘find their audience.’” Speaking with Kima Jones about the importance of diversity in all aspects of publishing. | NPR
• “Write the night enormous./Is that what souls are for?” A poem by Mark Doty. | BuzzFeed Reader
• “Cole attempts to untangle the knot of who or what belongs to us and to whom or what do we belong as artists, thinkers and, finally, human beings.” Claudia Rankine on Teju Cole’s new essay collection. | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• Adam Ehrlich Sachs on playing with and parodying the tradition of father-son literature, switching from academia to literature, and Borges fandoms. | Public Books
• Clancy Martin on his father, a weightlifter/New Age guru. | The New Republic
• “I loved it in one of those sinister, unstable isotopes of love, the kind you radiate toward people so seemingly perfect, so brilliant, that you want to subsume them into yourself.” On encountering The Last Samurai as a teen. | Catapult
• You’re like a radiant corpse: A story by Leopoldine Core. | Tin House

Also on Literary Hub: How to survive as an American writer in Bulgaria · Precious Rasheeda Muhammad traces a rich history of Black protest writing · It’s not all romance, you know: from “All About Alice” by Danielle McLaughlin, from her collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets

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