LitHub Daily: August 15, 2016

• The secret love of Edith Wharton’s life: on the mystery of Walter Van Rensselaer Berry. | Literary Hub
• Reading the partition of India: from Midnight’s Children to In Freedom’s Shade, Anjali Enjeti discovers a harrowing history. | Literary Hub
• On Xie Hong, master of Chinese unreality. | Literary Hub
• President Obama has released his summer reading list, which includes The Underground Railroad, H is for Hawk, and Barbarian Days. | TIME
• “In America, one cannot—must not—ever discount the lowest sort of political urgings:” Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Smiley, and others recommend books to make sense of Donald Trump. | The Guardian
• “I believe in art the way other people believe in God.” An interview with Lidia Yuknavitch. | Lenny
• How do you become a kinder person who happens to read and write? A conversation between Jenny Zhang and Nate Brown. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Her youth was spent auditioning and building identities, and as an adult, through fiction, she uses what she settled on for a purpose.” On Yaa Gyasi’s path to acclaimed author and debut novel. | The Nation
• Against the emancipatory possibilities of hotness: On two new books about contemporary girlhood, American Girls and Girls and Sex. | NYRB
• “I used the winch of poetry. I said that I needed a place of my own to write, which was true. But I also wanted to have freedom to lead my life and to fall in love and to do things I couldn’t do under my father’s roof.” Sandra Cisneros on moving into her first apartment. | NPR
• Beyond Murakami: A Japanese literature-in-translation reading list, including works by Kenzaburō Ōe, Banana Yoshimoto, and Hiromi Kawakami. | Barnes & Noble Reads

Also on Literary Hub: Interview with a bookstore: Farley’s Bookshop in New Hope, PA · Our language is ever updating, but meaning remains · From the Man Booker Prize longlist: an excerpt from Deborah Levy’s novel, Hot Milk