LitHub Daily: July 29, 2016

TODAY: In 1954, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring is published. Fell deeds awake, etc.

• What I learned growing up gay in a south Texas dance hall. | Literary Hub
• Madeleine Dubus on finding a way to mourn a father beloved by the literary world. | Literary Hub
• Women crime writers are not a fad: on Terence Rafferty’s Atlantic essay and Megan Abbott. | Literary Hub
• A historic night at the DNC: Timothy Denevi finds hope (and Katy Perry) at a hotel bar in Philadelphia. | Literary Hub
• I learned fear here: Lucia Berlin’s final stories, “a series of sketches which traced her life.” | The New Yorker
• James Alan McPherson, the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, has died. | The New York Times
• From Anne Carson to Zadie Smith, the most anticipated books of the fall. | Publishers Weekly
• Masha Gessen on “the recent Putin fixation,” which is “a way to evade the fact that Trump is a thoroughly American creation that poses an existential threat to American democracy.” | NYRB
• How What Belongs to You and A Little Life “show how shame — just as much as pride, if not more—still meaningfully forms part of the terrain of gay life, and must be acknowledged as such.” | Pacific Standard
• “When I’m asked if I like Steinbeck—a topic on which my feelings are anything but tepid or benign—my mind starts to spin a little.” Lindsay Hatton on the concept of “liking” authors. | Signature Reads
• “Why had our love meant so little to Ba?” An excerpt from Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing. | Granta
• The life-changing magic of thinning the herd: A step-by-step guide for getting rid of books. | The Awl

Also on Literary Hub: What The Last Samurai reveals about American literary culture · What to do when an indigenous language disappears: on Guatmela’s Tz’utujil people and the politics of language preservation · How long would I have to run by moonlight? From Don’t Tell Me You’re Afraid by Giuseppe Catozzella, translated by Anne Milano Appel 

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