LitHub Daily: January 13, 2016

TODAY: In 1898, novelist Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” is published in a Paris newspaper. 

• Don’t let your mother read this: how a mother-daughter translation team makes it work. | Literary Hub
• “Jeb at -5% floats weightless in salt marsh alongside an eternal sea, hears the cries of gulls far distant, wonders blissful when they will pick at his bones.” Short fiction by Jeff VanderMeer. | Okey-Panky
• Parul Sehgal’s new column debuted with her reflections on the “spider of a writer” Bohumil Hrabal. | The New York Times
• “There it was. A new tumor, large, filling my right middle lobe.” An excerpt from neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s posthumously published memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. | The New Yorker
• It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines: On the growing importance of a strong first sentence. | Electric Literature
• The White Review’s translation issue, which includes work by/interviews with Marlene van Niekerk, Eka Kurniawan, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, and others. | The White Review
• Seeing through the eyes of Dadaab: An interview with Ben Rawlence, author of City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp. | NPR
• “‘You killed it,’ said the man. ‘It fell,’ said Mum.” An excerpt from Lina Wolff’s Bret Easton Ellis And The Other Dogs. | Asymptote Journal
• Creative Capital has granted its awardees (including Jesse Ball, Percival Everett, and Eileen Myles) over four million dollars. | Creative Capital

Also on Literary Hub: A Phone Call from Paul: William Gibson talks to Paul Holengraber about phones, fiction, and the end of the world  · The Attic, a writers’ haven in Portland · Maybe it’s like being born: from Jessica Chiarella’s And Again

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