LitHub Daily: August 31, 2015

TODAY: In 1842, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, editor of Women’s Era, the first newspaper published by and for African-American women, is born. 

• Matthew Salesses on the need for diverse diverse books and moving beyond the “single story” from marginalized writers. | Literary Hub
• Oliver Sacks, writer, doctor, and neuropsychological explorer, died yesterday at age 82. | The New York Times
• “It seemed to me that my world was and would forever remain the neighborhood, Naples.” An excerpt from Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child. | The Guardian
• Their griefs are (not) transient: Claudia Rankine writes to Thomas Jefferson. | The Washington Post
• “T. S. Eliot Would Have Liked Beach House,” the title of an actual article and argument made by freshmen at liberal arts colleges across the world, probably. | The New Yorker
• On the enchanting properties of poetry, a primal form of literature and universal human art. | The Dark Horse
• A graphic novel adaptation of Swann’s Way has liberated Proust from “a ghetto of snobs” and become a bestseller. | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• On Amitav Ghosh’s Flood of Fire, “a thought-provoking window… onto both the distant past and our own times.” | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• “It’s hard not to be completely disappointed in the world and the way your intellect is received or ignored just because you have a vagina.” An interview with Ottessa Moshfegh. | Bookforum

Also on Literary Hub: On two centuries of bearded, literary Brooklynites summering in Montauk · Visiting Magers & Quinn bookstore in the Twin Cities · Avoiding bears in Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods

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