LitHub Daily: June 11, 2015

TODAY: In 1925, William Styron is born. 

• Cormac James talks to Philip Hoare about the spooky vision of whales, the fathomless depths of fiction, and the murderous power of the elements. | Literary Hub
• Mat Johnson on pregnancy scares, emotional realism, and how writing is like dreaming. | Hazlitt
• Joyce Carol Oates, either the Internet’s kookiest aunt or most elevated troll, is concerned about the needless slaughter of innocent triceratops’. | The Guardian
• To help us all on our quest to become Maggie Nelson, a list of the books that influenced her writing of The Argonauts. | Reader’s Almanac
• “There’s really no worse place to interview someone than a Russian bathhouse,” falsely attests this interview with (and excerpt from) Joshua Cohen. | VICE
• Valeria Luiselli on artists as sophisticated impostors, the torturous nature of writing, and translation as a method to create new networks of meanings. | Bookanista
• Ben Lerner advocates for the potentiality of poetry when it is read with perfect contempt. | London Review of Books
• “The fragmented motifs, repeated images, are scattered throughout the texts and sweep you along to a conclusion, at which there magically appears sense to the whole.” On the experience of reading W.G. Sebald. | The Millions
• To sell your novel, double down on being detested by drawing on both your experience of living in NYC and getting an MFA (and throw in a dash of Scandinavia). | Flavorwire

Also on Literary Hub: Oscar Villalon talks to newly crowned literary star Jack Livings · The great letter-writers: a reading list · An excerpt from Eimear McBride’s debut, now out in paperback

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