LitHub Daily: July 15, 2015

• Richard Ford on why we like Chekhov and the perfect truths of the Russian master. | Literary Hub
• Alejandro Zambra on 1970s Chilean clowns, not becoming a soccer star, and the inevitable comparisons to Roberto Bolaño. | VICE
• Visiting America’s burnt churches, the vestiges of “an action meant to give life to a roiling so deep and hidden and disgusting it can only birth ruins.” | Atticus Review
• Melville House is publishing Pope “Chill Pope” Francis’s encyclical on climate change; our prayers are with the polar bears. | GalleyCat
• Feeling nostalgic for the Atticus Finch of yore? As it turns out, he may have always been a racist. | The New Republic
  
• A review of Oreo, Fran Ross’s recently republished, “flat-out fearless and funny and sexy and sublime” comic novel. | The New York Times
• Today in archival literary drama: Charles Dickens’s annotated literary periodical, henceforth known as the Rosetta Stone of Victorian studies, has been discovered. | The Guardian
• Lucy Ives on non-literary poetics, mimesis, and Kim Kardashian’s ever-growing butt. | The Believer Logger
• Tracking down the culprits behind the inadequate and imprecise moniker “creative nonfiction.” | Creative Nonfiction

Also on Literary Hub: Who is the Chekhov of your country? · The ultimate Bloomsbury reading list (not just Virginia Woolf’s bibliography, promise) · A poem by Geoffrey G. O’Brien · Want more Harper Lee? Go Set a Watchman in ten quotes · Chekhov’s masterful story, “Hush!”