LitHub Daily: July 19, 2016

TODAY: In 2009, Francis “Frank” McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Angeles Ashes, dies. 

• Lindsay Hatton on death, beauty, and the haunting of an aquarium. | Literary Hub
• On the journals of famous writers: Dustin Illingworth investigates our obsession with the daily notes of genius. | Literary Hub
• Laura Tillman on how to tell a murderer’s story. | Literary Hub
• The Grumpy Librarian: for fans of Canadian writers, and enemies of humor. | Literary Hub
• “Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care what you wrote.” Speaking with Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal. | The New Yorker
• “The interview is a silly form, I thought, until the interview I had recorded was gone.” In which Rebecca Schiff and Alejandro Zambra get kicked off a school bench and have an unrecorded conversation. | Electric Literature
• “Writers simply can’t help themselves. In a way they’re sort of like the queen of England. Every writer is doomed to his or her profession.” An interview with Cynthia Ozick. | NPR
• In honor of what would have been Albert Murray’s 100th birthday, Full Stop dedicates a week to his life and works, including interviews with Murray, an interview with one of his leading scholars, and more. | Full Stop
• Max Ritvo on the point of poetry, lethal imagination, and Mommy Daddy God stuff. | Divedapper
• “It’s time to climb out of the mourning pit and work even harder than before at holding on to a European identity and keeping channels open to personal and literary dialogues with our European neighbours.” Jen Calleja remedies the Brexit with a reading list of translated European literature. | The Quietus
• A roundtable on Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, “one of the most exciting post-Revolution novels written in Egypt in the last few years.” | The New Inquiry
• “When you’re young, the most important thing is how a drink makes you feel; when you’re a little older, it’s about how it tastes.” Rumaan Alam drinks Tequila Fortaleza Añejo and tastes the past. | The Wall Street Journal

Also on Literary Hub: An early dispatch from Timothy Denevi, on the road to the RNC · Rachel Ignotofsky celebrates astronomers, entomologists, and biologists · Books making news this week:  D.C., the internet, and Helen Gurley Brown · Since when do we own a firearm? From Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be The Place

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