LitHub Daily: August 16, 2016

TODAY: In 1932, Christopher Okigbo, Nigerian poet who died fighting for Biafran independence, is born. 

• What does “silence” mean in the age of digital noise? On Zeus, twitter, and mixed sensory metaphors. | Literary Hub
• When was my mother no longer my mother? Confronting the loss of selfhood in the face of MS. | Literary Hub
• Famous skeletons: Lydia Pyne on meeting the Taung Child and other celebrity fossils. | Literary Hub
• Not quite a myth, but mythologized: On the space the Underground Railroad occupies in the American imagination and the narratives we construct around it. | The New Yorker
• “In a world where queer individuals have been systematically brutalized by social and political forces, queer sex is a radical, brave act.” Garrard Conley on shame, sexuality, and safety. | BuzzFeed Reader
• Colson Whitehead on America’s slow progress, becoming a better editor of himself, and being free to have an eccentric career. | Vulture
• “Diski’s voice has always been notable for its combination of cognitive power and a curiously impersonal intensity, but the analytic rage that motivates so much of her writing finally strikes me as expressing pain rather than judgment.” On Jenny Diski’s final book. | Public Books
• You’ve been convicted of possession of two guns—and a poem: An illustrated rendering of Amiri Baraka’s 1968 arrest and farce of a trial. | The Paris Review
• THE REAL YOU IS SEXY: On the anxiety of authenticity, from the Enlightenment to today. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• On the descriptive potential of fictional clothes and characters enhanced by their outfits, from Anna Karenina to Holden Caulfield. | The Millions
• In bizarre yet somehow unsurprising news, the antlers Hunter S. Thompson stole from Ernest Hemingway have finally been returned. | GalleyCat

Also on Literary Hub: From the Booker Prize longlist: an excerpt from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, now out in paperback · Books making news this week: floods, ponds, and grief · I want to meet people: from Gonzalo Torné’s Divorce is in the Air

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