LitHub Daily: August 5, 2015

TODAY: In 1850, Guy de Maupassant, father of the modern short story, owner of glorious mustache, is born. 

• Álvaro Enrigue meditates on the Mexican middle-class, the rise of the narcoterrorist, and the symbolic power of the Volkswagen bug. | Literary Hub

• Why the Bloomsbury Group continues to fascinate people it would have despised (by someone who has clearly never been to junior high). | The New Statesman

• “He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.” A depressing account of submitting a novel under a male pseudonym. | Jezebel
• Reading the journals of Salvador Dalí, who identified primarily as a writer, not a dorm room poster designer. | Hazlitt
• On the discrediting of professional writers and #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter (“I’ve aggregated your tweet under a picture of Hannah Horvath.”) | The New Republic
• If rock and roll can find a place in a Meryl Streep movie, it can find a place in the novel: the literary intersection of rock music and the domestic. | The Rumpus
• Exploring fiction by Indian-American writers, who do not need to be explained to white audiences. | India Currents
• Ukrainian-language and Russian-language, pro-west and pro-Russian, official and independent: the writing life in Ukraine. | Electric Literature
• A view into the eerily contemporary concerns of Weimar Germany through 1,000 book covers spanning from 1919 to 1933. | The Design Observer Group

Also on Literary Hub: Alexander Chee on the present tense · The five books making news this week · Adam Fitzgerald interviews poet Fred Moten · Gabriel Urza in Basque Country, an excerpt from All That Followed

---