LitHub Daily: January 27, 2016

TODAY: In 2009, John Updike dies. 

• “We would never have a monkey behave like that in a Japanese children’s book.” Marie Mutsuki Mockett on fairytales and storytelling from East to West. | Literary Hub
• Sunil Yapa on race, writing, and empathy as a radical act. | Literary Hub
• The results of Lee & Low’s diversity baseline survey reveals that publishing is 79% white, 78% female, 88% heterosexual, and 92% not differently able. | Lee & Low
• “While reading Tranströmer’s work, just before I started translating him, I often felt that he was speaking to me.” An interview with Patty Crane, Tomas Tranströmer’s most recent translator. | The Paris Review
• Journal excerpts from Sara Nović’s visit to the ultimate foreign land: Cincinnati. | Blunderbuss Magazine
• It begins as an opera would begin: The first chapter of Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night. | Longreads
• Toxic rivers and poisonous mines: five books to better understand the Flint water crisis. | Signature Reads
• “Pages rarely tremble with such life as when expressing their author’s death.” On the end-of-life memoir. | The New Yorker
• Der Nister, Louis Couperus, Thomas Mann, and other “Victorian” novelists beyond Britain. | World Literature Today
• In a very relatable sentiment, an 11-year-old wunderkind became “sick of reading about white boys and [their] dogs” and launched an initiative to collect 1,000 books featuring black female protagonists. | Jezebel

Also on Literary Hub: A Phone Call from Paul: Cheryl Strayed on sex, grief and joy · The perpetual importance of Miss Lonelyhearts · Lucha libre wrestler, DJ, sociologist: from Carlos Velázquez’s The Cowboy Bible, trans. by Achy Obejas

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