LitHub Daily: June 23, 2015

TODAY: In 1889, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova is born. 

• Brian Castner, writer, bomb technician in Iraq, on being one of the few people in the world to have his life turned into an opera. | Literary Hub
• “Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.” Claudia Rankine reflects on the murders in Charleston. | The New York Times Magazine
• Vendela Vida on experimenting with the malleability of identity, the difference between fiction and film, and using names as masks. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
• Is a liberal arts education just a very, very expensive “parsley garnish on a 16-ounce steak?” | Guernica
• Interrogating Privacy v. Security or Liberty v. Tyranny or Evildoers v. Good Guys: an interview with Andrew Elvin. | The Rumpus
• We are all cheats and liars: on the unnamed, hybrid genre lying somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. | The Millions
• Valeria Luiselli reviews The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, who “strips language to the bone, in search of some kind of metaphysical core or nucleus.” | Publishers Weekly
• On Christine Brooke-Rose’s castrative writings. | Bookforum
• For a change, a poet musing on whether one can inhabit personae without declining into “minstrelsy and stereotype.” | Michigan Quarterly Review

Also on Literary Hub: A literary salon in West Philadelphia · Who are The Subprimes?

---