LitHub Daily: January 20, 2016

TODAY: In 1873, Danish Noble Prize winner Johannes V. Jensen is born. 

• Sergei Lebedev on why there is no place for joy in today’s Moscow, a city sealed in silence. | Literary Hub
• Garth Greenwell on feeling excluded from desire, the meeting of the physical and metaphysical in sex, and writing on trash. | The Paris Review
• In a task more daunting than setting up a Snapchat, Hilary Clinton will have to rid herself of associations with Lady Macbeth. | Guernica
• Pigs moving outside of space and time: Paul Lisicky on his favorite Flannery O’Connor passage. | The Atlantic
• An article that wonders what we love about War and Peace and later describes it as “Downton Abbey goes to Moscow,” thus answering its own question. | The New Yorker
• Writing an eternal present day: On pop culture references in novels, from American Psycho to A Little Life. | Electric Literature
• “To find these people, to understand how they lived and how they died and how oppressed they were, the reality hits you.” Regina Mason on discovering her ancestor’s memoir about escaping slavery. | NPR
• To “attract more varied candidates into publishing,” Penguin Random House will no longer require applicants to have a college degree. | The Guardian
• In what reads like a fairy tale written for a Free People catalogue, the city of Seattle will pay a poet to live and write in a bridge. | Atlas Obscura

Also on Literary Hub: A Phone Call from Paul, continued: William Gibson on technophobia and the power of film · Librarian Confidential: Stephanie Anderson shares her librarian origin story · Translating the euphemisms of Bernie and Hilary · Austral Summer, 1962: From Ingrid Betancourt’s The Blue Line

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