LitHub Daily: June 2, 2016

TODAY: In 1977, Raymond Carver quits drinking. 

• On writing Islamic identity and being labeled a political writer: a conversation between Leila Aboulela and Elnathan John. | Literary Hub
• Seven ways to hand-sell Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, a lost modern masterpiece. | Literary Hub
• When American was on the brink of a second revolution: an oral history of campus revolts in the 1970s. | Literary Hub
• Terry Castle on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt as a species of crime fiction. | Bookforum
• James Bond and Jonathan Franzen walk into a bar: Showtime has announced a Purity TV show, with Daniel Craig set to star. | Buzzfeed Books
• Heidi Julavits remembers Soup for the King, the children’s book that inspired her former love of soup for breakfast on cold Maine mornings. | Extra Crispy
• Decolonizing the canon: English students at Yale have launched a petition to eliminate a two semester course requirement on “major English poets.” | The Guardian
• Michelle Dean on the vagueness and ubiquity of “liminality,” which boasts a 14,000 word Wikipedia entry. | The Awl
• “Because no matter how many times you say words like ‘freedom’ and ‘justice,’ genocide is still genocide and slavery is still slavery.” Daniel José Older responds to the Writers On Trump open letter. | Electric Literature
• Adrienne Celt and Esmé Weijun Wang discuss redemption, research, and inherited trauma. | ZYZZYVA
• “It was by accident that Doña Toña decided to sell her daughters’ tears.” Short fiction by Martha Batiz. | Words Without Borders

Also on Literary Hub: Actually, criticism is literature: writing about the art of writing is an art unto itself · How to write through dreams · Ain’t I been though enough? From Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

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