LitHub Daily: July 9, 2015

• A helpful primer by Nell Zink on how to send stuff to Germany. | Literary Hub
• Amelia Gray constructs a metaphor for love: a shit-covered swan on an “idiot float through its stagnant little inland sea.” | Electric Literature
• Percival Everett on the importance of place, familiarity as intellectual fast food, and the irony of earnestness. | Virginia Quarterly Review
• An interview with Jay Rubin, author, longtime translator of Haruki Murakami, and (former) advocate for the word “lavatory” over “bathroom.” | The Rumpus
• Ben Marcus describes the mixtape of short stories he made for you. | Flavorwire
• Filling the page with redundant, anonymous, always defective words: on Borges’s infinite library and the futility of writing. | Gorse
• The novel is dead and the novel will never die: revisiting John Barth’s final book. | Public Books
• On the modern finance novel, which illuminates our ignorance through information. | Dissent Magazine
• A list from the 1970s of neglected works, brought to our attention once more so that we may treat them more kindly now. | The American Scholar

Also on Literary Hub: Happy birthday Nikola Tesla, alien genius · What is the relationship between poetry and the selfie? · Five poems by Rae Armantrout · Exchanging princesses on a small island in the middle of the Bidasoa River in 1722