LitHub Daily: June 26, 2015

• When life got worse than fiction, Joelle Renstrom broke up with her novel to write a memoir. | Literary Hub
• “Hit him in the teeth.” Junot Díaz recounts the horror and humiliation of his inconveniently timed first beat-down. | The New York Times Magazine
• An experimental Argentine writer is facing possible jail time for his Borgesian remix of Borges. | The Guardian
• On Saul Bellow’s Jewish heritage, which played a fundamental role in the development of his revolutionary, “decorative, unashamedly expressive” language. | The Times of Israel
• Censorship, freedom, faith, lexicography, and the fickle nature of books and the words they contain: a conversation about the Guantánamo Bay Detainee Library. | The Kenyon Review
• “Put out the brie, pour the Chablis, and try to find Lynn, Binky, Mort, Esther, and Sonny hiding in the pages.” A review of Jonathan Galassi’s Muse. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “The happy ending would be growing old with her husband and getting progressively better at golf. That doesn’t make for an interesting novel.” An interview with Karolina Waclawiak. | Millihelen
• Kent Russell on lexical potpourris, white guys in glasses explaining rap music, and Haterade. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
• Thirty years after the genre-defining Blood Meridian (and four years after the stunning film Cowboys & Aliens), revisionist Westerns are having a proper literary moment. | Electric Literature

Also on Literary Hub: On creating your own favorite genre · Michelangelo Signorile talks to Alexander Chee about gay marriage and beyond · A brief history of the “great gay novel” · Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog, now in paperback