LitHub Daily: February 19, 2016

TODAY: In 1953, The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan is born.

• How to fictionalize the world’s greatest world record holder. | Literary Hub
• On the anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s death, cataloging his life and crimes in the Big Apple. | Literary Hub
• The patient is still alive, if not exactly well: John Ashbery on the presence and poetry of Delmore Schwartz. | The New Yorker
• “I didn’t expect to meet such powerful women in a place where everything I had heard about was men and the patriarchy.” On Nigeria’s self-published littattafan soyayya (books of love). | Wired
• Álvaro Enrigue on the importance of translation, writing a novel about Caravaggio, and hundreds of metaphorical bridges. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
• Beyond Jane Eyre and Little Women: Eight classic female Bildungsroman, for your reading pleasure. | The Toast
• “It’s always difficult to talk about what I seek to do in my writing, because so much of it is beyond the level of consciousness.” An interview with Jonathan Lee. | Tin House
• Naturalistic love stories and bloody-eyed investigations: On the new books about Silicon Valley. | Flavorwire
• “We’re building a new canon. We’re building new ways of being free.” Tanwi Nandini Islam on publishing her debut novel. | Catapult
• Studies show that our robot overlords will be kind to us if we teach them to read. | The Guardian

Also on Literary Hub: 30 books in 30 days: counting down the NBCC finalists with Katherine A. Powers on T. J. Stiles’ Custer’s Trials · Interview with a Gatekeeper: Copper Canyon’s Michael Wiegers · From Nayomi Munaweera’s What Lies Between Us

---