LitHub Daily: January 9, 2017

TODAY: In 1868, John William De Forest, writing for The Nation, calls for a more specifically American literature; the essay’s title, “The Great American Novel“, is the first known use of the term.

• Reuniting the scattered halves of Alexandre Dumas’s sequel to The Three Musketeers. | Literary Hub
• Economist James Kwak on the cult of “economism” and the Democrats’ failure to tell a good story. | Literary Hub
• A brief survey of books dubbed “the Great American Novel.” There have been a lot of Great American Novels, apparently. | Literary Hub
• On John Edgar Wideman and the legacy of the Till family: Mitchell Jackson talks with Lorraine Berry. | Literary Hub
• “If likability equals profitability, I’m probably headed in the wrong direction.” Emily Gould on the compulsory niceness of women in publishing. | BuzzFeed Reader
• Why are so many stories about girlhood really stories about pain? On female sadness, Leslie Jamison, and Emma Cline’s The Girls. | The Baffler
• “His is an ancient craft, and across many public library systems, a fading one.” Donald Vass is the last book mender at Seattle’s King County Library. | The New York Times
• From Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness, 10 essential books for parents of transgender children (or, “Essential Books for Humans Who Have Ever Felt Different or Nonconforming Themselves or Loved Someone Who Did”) | Publishers Weekly
• Jessica Valenti on combating online abuse and giving advice to young girls. | The Rumpus
• “He knits together the vocabularies of science and art, memory and prediction, literature and math, physics and emotion.” How Ted Chiang became one of the most influential science fiction writers of his generation. | The New Yorker
• Michael Moorcock on his long friendship with 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C. Clarke, and Clarke’s behind-the-scenes power struggle with Stanley Kubrick. | New Statesman

And on Literary Hub: Otto Penzler recommends five books for January · A battle in verse, over Sherlock · From Lindsay Lee Johnson’s new novel The Most Dangerous Place on Earth.

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