LitHub Daily: July 20, 2015

TODAY: In 1933, Cormac McCarthy was born. 

• From job to job, book to book, the unemployed life of a professional writer on the west coast of Canada. | Literary Hub
• Books capturing the spirit of California and New York, presented as minimalist still lifes. | T Magazine
• “It wasn’t just that the stories were gripping; they were also my inheritance, my fate.” Sandie Friedman recounts her obsession with Holocaust narratives. | The Rumpus
• Stealing, hoarding, and making things up: the formation of American English. | Atlas Obscura
• On the tantalizing and revolutionary poetry of Psappho, inventor of the guitar pick and perhaps love itself. | The Weekly Standard
• “Absolutely disgusting… I liked it; 3 stars.” On attempting to rate (and process) Samuel R. Delany’s morally repugnant but artfully crafted Hogg. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Writing about the power writing holds: an interview with, and two short stories from, Wendy C. Ortiz. | Connotation Press
• In which a phallic drone named Predator 923 writes a play. | n+1
• Prominent literary figures reveal the classics they haven’t read (from Ulysses to The Hunger Games) and their reasoning (from weakness of will to resisting popular opinion). | Hazlitt

Also on Literary Hub: The best little bookstore in Big Sky country: Fact & Fiction · An excerpt from Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning, now out in paperback

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