LitHub Daily: December 4, 2015

TODAY: In 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke is born, begins life as a very young poet. 

• How A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes rediscovered the lost genius of Bette Howland (along with her trove of letters from Saul Bellow). | Literary Hub
• Zadie Smith on the elegant demolition of binary thinking, childlike innocence in the face of literary artifice, and how NW could have been called Goodbye to All That. | The White Review
• “From your loving me I’ve drawn a measure of courage that never would have come to me otherwise. You’ve given me the courage to decide to be a writer.” On the relationship of, and correspondence between, Jane and Kurt Vonnegut. | The New Yorker
• “I, we, don’t need to read more diverse books—We’re reading them, we’ve written them, we’ve lived them.” A letter to the American literary community from the diversity (channeled by Morgan Parker). | Harriet
• A tradition of dissent, drift, and love for the random that is the truest meaning of counterculture: an interview with Curtis White. | The Paris Review
• “Is the novel dead because MFA programs are fighting a genre war with unlikable characters?” On the misconceptions and countless thinkpieces about genre and literary fiction. | Electric Literature
• Hers is a story of art as liberation: On Molly Crabapple’s artistic arrogance and illustrated memoir. | BuzzFeed Books
• The earliest known biography of an African woman (a powerful noblewoman-turned-saint named Walatta Petros) has been translated into English for the first time. | The Guardian
• Laura van den Berg and Elisa Gabbert discuss uncertainty, narrator overlap, and getting to the guts of a story. | The Critical Flame

Also on Literary Hub: How a long-lost note from a long-dead explorer prophesies the end of the Arctic (if you’re at the Paris Summit, please read this)  ·  Why economic barriers to being a writer impoverish the whole culture  · Why I bought PANK Magazine · ‘Criminal No. 76028’ or, as he was better known, Ezra Pound: from the third volume of A. David Moody’s biography

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