LitHub Daily: August 6, 2015

TODAY: In 1809, Alfred Lord Tennyson, most Victorian poet of all the Victorians, is born. 

• Alexander Chee looks back at Peter Carey’s The Tax Collector and why Carey is a punk rock novelist. | Literary Hub
• This book is about attention/humanity/control/class/place/death/grief: confronting wildness and loss with H is for Hawk. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Hanya Yanagihara on clickbait, the meaninglessness of author bios, and the continued victory of non-trash over trash. | The Millions
• Sarah Gerard talks exes (best friend, boyfriend) and the writing they (did, did not) inspire. | The Rumpus
• “The brilliance of literature is not the great myth of the genius single author’s soul, but a vast invisible infinity of meaning surfaced by the work with language.” An interview with Mark von Schlegell. | BOMB Magazine
• Evoking the menace of the mundane: on Helen Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat, the latest in a long legacy of office literature. | The New Republic
• Transforming languages from “biased, fucked-up structures” to arsenals of weapons: an interview with Meena Kandasamy. | Ploughshares
• Updating Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary for the Twitter age. | The Verge
• Whoever claimed the physical book was dying didn’t realize how beautiful its spine is (an oversight never made by Lauren Conrad). | The Washington Post

Also on Literary Hub:  Part II of Adam Fitzgerald’s interview with Fred Moten · Inside the spin room of the modern politician: an excerpt from The Speechwriter

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