LitHub Daily: January 16 – 20, 2017

• “The role of stories to unify—as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize—is more important than ever.” President Obama discusses books and his love of reading with Michiko Kakutani. | The New York Times
• “I read my poem, feeling American poets alive and dead by my side, feeling myself as representative in the most grave and beautiful way.” Elizabeth Alexander on composing and reciting a poem for Obama’s first Inauguration. | The New Yorker
• The finalists for the 2017 NBCC Awards,  PEN Literary Awards, National Magazine Awards for Print and Digital Media, and Edgar Awards have been announced. | National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, ASME, TheEdgars.com
• I think genre is as much a lie as gender is: An interview with Eula Biss. | Fiction Advocate
• “What a toll it has taken, this death and grieving and loss!” An excerpt from Patty Yumi Cottrell’s novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. | BuzzFeed Reader
• “As long as Trump is in charge, if I absolutely have to visit the United States, I prefer to go in the queue for a regular visa with others.” Wole Soyinka, the first African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, has destroyed his Green Card. | The Atlantic
• Listen to me if you know what’s good for you: An advance look at Han Kang’s Human Acts. | Read it Forward
• “They see the same person they’ve always seen—the consummate classroom troublemaker; a vain, insecure bully; and an anti-institutional schemer, as adept at ‘gaming the system’ as he is unashamed.” Speaking with three of Trump’s biographers. | POLITICO
• “Those people who believe themselves to be beyond identity and ideology will, sooner or later, charge us with identity and ideology if we dare to commit that most unnatural act of speaking up and out.” An excerpt from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies. | BLARB
• Following Trump’s attacks of him, Rep. John Lewis’ memoir Walking With the Wind and National Book Award-winning graphic novel March sold out on Amazon. | The Washington Post
• Of course I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want: Ottessa Moshfegh speaks with Luke B. Goebel. | Fanzine
• “What I call for is a literature that craves the conflict and owns the destruction, a split-mind literature that features fear and handles shock, that keeps self-evident ‘reality’ safely within the quotation marks.” Aleksandar Hemon on writing in the age of Trump. | The Village Voice
• “There is an art to dying and the boy does not have it — never mind he has been dying since first he was born.” A short story by Chanelle Benz. | Electric Literature
• Language is the tool we use to build our political and democratic structures.” How writers are resisting Trump (and suggestions on how to give back). | Boston.com, GOOD Magazine
• “[Rachel] Cusk apparently had demanded too much—she had become a mother and wished to remain herself at the same time.” On motherhood, Outline, and Transit. | Broadly

Anna Pitoniak on what being an editor taught her about writing ·  75 books for the next 4 years: Writers recommend necessary reading for Inauguration Day and beyond · Hope was for her in 1966, as it is for us in 2017, elusive: On Susan Sontag’s response to “What’s Happening in America?” · What to read if you care about access to abortion in Trump’s America · On Martin Scorsese’s Silence and Shūsaku Endō’s eponymous source novel · On Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts and reporting the truth in the age of Trump · A writer, a reader, and a publisher weigh in on the use of sensitivity readers in publishing · Alan Glynn on fictional presidents and the satirical fever dream that is Trump’s presidency · Your literary guide to the Sundance Film Festival · On Marco Polo, unicorns, and the ever-widening political divide