LitHub Daily: July 10, 2015

TODAY: In 1931, Alice Munro is born, elevates small-town Canadian life to Nobel Prize levels of interesting. 

• Terrible, embarrassing writing by great writers, including Daniel Clowes, Isaac Fitzgerald, Gillian Flynn, and Steve Almond. | Literary Hub
• James Tate, “poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences,” died on Wednesday at age 71. | The Paris Review
• Not raw but alive: on the humanist infra-realism of Denis Johnson. | The White Review
• Maggie Nelson and A.L. Steiner lovingly transgress norms and the partition between intellectual and embodied experience. | BOMB Magazine
• Rereading To Kill a Mockingbird reveals the characters’ relative nonchalance and futile optimism for a future that hasn’t yet come. | LA Times
• To create publicity for his most recent novel, Chad Kultgen concocted a lovely and inoffensive scheme in which he posed as a feminist demanding ransom to not abort her fetus. | The Cut
• A letter to Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr., a woman who loved women and wrote as a man. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Revisiting Steinbeck’s memoir, in which he sets out to become reacquainted with America and discovers it to be not as great as he remembers. | Biographile
• A report from Lima’s first independent book fair, which did not take place in the Javits Center. | Hyperallergic

Also on Literary Hub: Celebrating late-blooming English novelists Penelope Fitzgerald and Jane Gardam · An excerpt from Sara Taylor’s Southern Gothic debut, The Shore

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