LitHub Daily: August 12, 2016

TODAY: In 1876, Mary Roberts Rinehart, “the American Agatha Christie,” is born. 

• Vu Tran on living with the uncertain memories of a four-year-old refugee. | Literary Hub
• Blair Braverman is obsessed with the things that scare her most: Gemma de Choisy heads north to visit the author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube. | Literary Hub
• The pros and cons of getting inside a villain’s mind: how to raise the stakes without ruining the mystery. | Literary Hub
• Sara Nović on leaving her first adult crisis for Newfoundland, “a name with the promise of a fresh start built into its very syllables.” | The New York Times
• “Ferrante deploys the run-on to create a momentum that is headlong and occasionally breathless but still intimate—here you are, inside the operation of Elena’s head, everything she thinks coming out in the order it occurs to her…” On Elena Ferrante’s run-on sentences. | Arcade
• “I want to testify for generations of Africans who came here. And my own ancestors.” An interview with Colson Whitehead. | TIME
• “The female gymnast’s condition is an exaggerated version of the condition of every teen-age girl.” On the US gymnastics team and Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me. | The New Yorker
• Tim Murphy on his twenty-five years in New York City, “both maker and destroyer of memories.” | Omnivoracious
• “I never consciously believed I was writing only for men, and yet I continually tried my hardest to edit everything female — anything I judged as emotional, silly, rambunctious, and dirty or sentimental — from my work.” Rufi Thorpe on the inspiring “stupidity” of Czesław Miłosz. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• People talk about “good” and “bad” writing as if it’s obvious what they are: Jo Livingstone and David Wolf address “some of the issues that rub up at the academic/writerly tectonic ridge.” | The Awl
• “While literature is not expected to have clinical applications, it should be fair enough not to condemn one in four… to death—even in fiction.” On living with bipolar disorder and literary depictions of mental illness. | American Short Fiction

Also on Literary Hub: The dark side of office life: workplace novels that explore the dystopic and surreal · On the poetry of Japanese painting: Shara Lessley and Paula Bohince in conversation · Throw them to the minotaur: from Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno, trans. by Andrea G. Labinger

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