LitHub Daily: July 21, 2016

TODAY: In 1899, American poet (and son of the inventor of Life Savers candy) Hart Crane is born. 

• The great Margaret Atwood on Donald Trump, witches, and flying cats. | Literary Hub
• Michelle Pretorius wrestles with her country’s past and uses the lies of fiction to get to the truth of apartheid. | Literary Hub
• Jenny Diski’s Jisei: David Ulin on death poems and In Gratitidue. | Literary Hub
• “Not many facets of the Trump apparition have so far gone unexamined, but I can think of a significant loose end.” Martin Amis on Donald Trump’s (in)sanity. | Harper’s Magazine
• “You can’t always trust the henchmen. Matter of fact, rule of thumb, never trust the henchmen.” An excerpt from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s forthcoming novel. | Ploughshares
• Kirstin Dunst is risking the wrath of Tumblr by adapting The Bell Jar into a film, which will star Dakota Fanning. | Deadline
• An “Eat, Pray, Love for the Caecilius in horto est set:” On Ann Patty’s Living with a Dead Language. | The New Yorker
• Everyone is dreaming very busily: Short fiction by Alice Sola Kim. | Lenny
• “If you were in this club seeing the tears roll down our eyes, feeling the sweat on our bodies, pouring down our torsos to our pants, as we move to Afrobeat, Afropop, highlife and juju, you would realise that WE ARE CHILDREN OF OUR GODS.” An essay by Pwaangulongii Dauod. | Granta
• From an orgasmic meditation demonstration at Burning Man to a potentially changed understanding of womanhood: An interview with Sarah Barmak, author of Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality. | Hazlitt
• “It’s just the Hungarian disease—a disease that certainly pervades the country’s art.” On László F. Földényi and the origins of melancholy. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Literary Hub: The art of dividing the world Into winners and losers: on Donald Trump, neo-natal reading, and a very American tragedy · The best books about books, part two: on works of criticism by Cynthia Ozick, C.D. Wright, Teju Cole, and more  · Report from Cleveland: Day three at the Republican National Convention devolves into a full-blown Roman Circus · A new poem by Brandon Som · The suicide cults: from Bill Broun’s Night of the Animals

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