LitHub Daily: June 2, 2015

• Mark Haskell Smith and Geoff Dyer play ping-pong together. | Literary Hub
• If you’re having trouble keeping up with our daily links, be prepared to feel OVERWHELMED: fiction issues from The New Yorker and VICE, featuring work from Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Ottessa Moshfegh, Deb Olin Unferth, and more. | The New Yorker, VICE
• Looking at magma beneath a culture: James Hannaham on our willful obliviousness to modern-day slavery, myth-making, and insidious clowns. | Guernica
• “There are people one wants to know, and people one does not want to know.” Two short stories by Padgett Powell. | Okey-Panky
• Philip Larkin, who would have had the least fun at BEA, refused an Oxford poetry professorship due to the tedious parties it entailed. | The Guardian
• Looking for clues, clews, Easter eggs, and rabbit holes in Mark Z. Danielewski’s signiconic The Familiar. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Overcoming “the eye-rolling factor” of a self-referential metafiction about a Brooklyn-based poet/novelist: on the irresistible charm of Ben Lerner. | Fiction Writers Review
• “The tobacconist was an intermediation between a life fully with his family and a life where he could leave them.” A short story by Anna Noyes. | American Short Fiction
• “I wanted the storyteller to be present in the story.” Chigozie Obioma on literary culture, superstition, and national identity. | Bookanista

Also on Literary Hub: John Freeman profiles the late Tomas Tranströmer · Teaching music to children in Palestine