LitHub Daily: July 6, 2016

TODAY: In 1893, Guy de Maupassant, who “coveted everything and [took] pleasure in nothing,” dies. 

• Cynthia Ozick on the letters of Saul Bellow. | Literary Hub
• The literature of tennis is the literature of life: all of existence within the lines. | Literary Hub
• Nicole Dennis-Benn and Chinelo Okparanta on language, character, and the perils of code-switching. | Literary Hub
• Lorraine Berry on Sisyphus as the ultimate soccer fan, and the intensity of family rivalries. | Literary Hub
• “I don’t want to be burdened with the responsibility of thinking: How can this be instructive or valuable? I try to go into writing already believing anything I have to say, no matter how small or petty or weird, is already valuable.” Karan Mahajan, Tanwi Nandini Islam, and Jenny Zhang in conversation. | VICE
• Unabashedly feminist books preparing to take the publishing world by storm: On Emily Books’ new imprint with Coffee House Press. | Brooklyn Magazine
• “I wondered how I could infiltrate and disrupt territories and languages and narratives that think themselves outside of this violence.” An interview with Solmaz Sharif. | Divedapper
• “The Man Booker International books come into English from only twenty-six languages, fourteen of which are official languages of the European Union—and those fourteen languages account for more than two-thirds of all the books submitted.” An analysis of the the Man Booker International Prize entries. | The Man Booker Prizes
• Patrick Ryan on Tang, Nixon’s alternate moon landing speech, and how revising a story can be like making out. | Electric Literature
• “What if I did the worst case scenario?” An interview with Jade Sharma. | The Influence
• How do we imagine the literary scholar to be different from the literary blogger? On the evolving role of the public intellectual in the post-comp lit era. | 3:AM Magazine
• The staff of Brazos Bookstore discusses why Grief is the Thing With Feathers is the ~book of the moment.~ | Brazos Bookstore

Also on Literary Hub: Guy Gavriel Kay on sorting through millions of rules for writing · My mother is gone, but her edits remain: on grief, writing, and Jhumpa Lahiri · The storm is brewing: from Hannah Pittard’s Listen to Me

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