LitHub Daily: August 12, 2015

TODAY: In 1827, William Blake, 18th-century weirdo, dies. 

• Wendy S. Walters on Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s African Burying Ground and memorializing the unknown dead. | Literary Hub
• “Franzen’s prose is alive with intelligence,” and yet, he has decided to take on feminism and the Internet in his most recent novel. | The Atlantic
• “I’m just over halfway through Kafka on the Shore and I have a burning question: what is this shit?” On hating the writing of a talented writer. | The Guardian
• No straight path to solace: two accounts of losing a brother and, with him, a self to define against. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Who needed girls when you could have stuff like this?” On “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem for teens. | The New Republic
• Poetry is more than a Xeroxed dream journal: overcoming the distance of description. | Five Dials
• Amitava Kumar describes how Philip Roth, he of “monumental dumbness,” became central to his thinking. | Library of America’s Reader’s Almanac
• Writing beyond the singularity of stereotypes: on Tendai Huchu’s “fresh and moving account of contemporary Zimbabwe.” | The New York Times
• From the necessity of pen names to a lack of due credit, a look at the historical roots of sexism in publishing. | Ploughshares

Also on Literary Hub: Claire Messud on why she writes · Three poems by Bernadette Mayer · Hot nights, murdered fathers: a story by Ambrose Bierce

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