LitHub Daily: July 28, 2016

TODAY: In 1866, Helen Beatrix Potter, author, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist best known for her children’s books featuring animals, is born. 

• Women writing Brazil: selections from PEN America’s new issue of Glossolalia. | Literary Hub
• How the writer uses humor: Aleksandar Hemon in conversation with John Freeman. | Literary Hub
• Beyond Franz Kafka, David Foster Wallace, and Joseph Heller: On the rise of “workplace novels written by and mostly marketed to women.” | The New Yorker
• “My characters are the people who we would normally try to erase from our daily lives.” An interview with Chris Abani. | The Guardian
• Alexandra Kleeman on How It’s Made, which “reminds the viewer that time spent watching TV is time spent not with people but in the company of an incredible object.” | The New York Times Magazine
• Helen Phillips on evoking worlds, environmental anxiety, and giving dignity and agency to the female body. | Chicago Review of Books
• “When I learned more about fiction and when I got to a graduate writing program, I saw that fiction gave me the most leeway to get at a deeper truth than what was in the facts.” An interview with Mitchell S. Jackson. | Moss
• Jay McInerney on his mentor, Raymond Carver, and Carver’s 1984 essay about his father. | Esquire Classic
• “minutes more of long light/wanting a pool of words” Two poems by Hoa Nguyen. | Hyperallergic
• The self is ……………..^v^: An interview with Paul Chan. | The Believer Logger

Also on Literary Hub: A neoliberal trojan horse: Dave Zirin on the Olympics · Four stories of God by Joy Williams · Hair, with superpowers: from Scott Lowe’s Object Lesson, Hair

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