LitHub Daily: August 21, 2015

TODAY: In 1762, writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is born; when Alexander Pope declared his love for her, she burst into a fit of laughter. 

• The confessions of a reformed book thief in Wichita, Kansas. | Literary Hub
• Nabokov’s most recent biography shows the author stitching himself “squarely into the American quilt.” | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• On the farsighted early fiction of Truman Capote, “blue-eyed, bantam chicken… expert cartwheeler and a dress-up.” | Full Stop
• Giving a classy dame a proper funeral: on Jami Attenberg’s Saint Mazie. | Electric Literature
• On Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk, the inadequacy of life as compared to art, and the rise of the friendship narrative. | The Boston Review
• New Jersey, the butt of one thousand unimaginative jokes, provides the backdrop for some incredibly imaginative fiction. | Oyster Review of Books
• Life is not a story: on the difficulty of transforming one’s experience into a narrative. | The Guardian
• Translating texts (ranging from Plato to Radiohead) into forests with Katie Holten’s arboreal typeface. | Asymptote Journal
• The last notes escape me: Lauren Acampora remembers her father and his love for Debussy’s “Clair De Lune.” | New England Review

Also on Literary Hub: An interview with poet Deborah Landau · An excerpt from Lori Jakiela’s Belief Is It’s Own Kind of Truth, Maybe

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