LitHub Daily: June 29, 2016

TODAY: In 1861, Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning dies. 

• Stephen King has legible handwriting: an old note on the origin of Scott Landon’s driving music. | Literary Hub
• The seven stages of love, revealed by seven French love poems. | Literary Hub
• The unyielding rituals of little Britain: Homer Sykes’ document of rural English tradition, 40 years on. | Literary Hub
• Why does anyone write? Alice Adams on why writing a novel is a painful and bloody process. | Literary Hub
• Melania decided she would order the flowers herself: A Donald Trump-inspired short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. | The New York Times Book Review
• “I think this tension between the intimate and the vast is at the heart of every poem by any poet, though of course the terms with which it is explored vary.” An interview with Tracy K. Smith. | Guernica
• Geoff Dyer on narrative propulsion, flickering back and forth between comedy and seriousness, and pilgrimages. | Hazlitt
• “She doesn’t want to fix the story line so much as she wants to see beyond it.” On Jenny Diski’s final book. | The New Yorker
• “What’s the purpose of your visit?” Laila Lalami on attending the Palestine Festival of Literature. | The Nation
• Books should have a purpose: Jesse Ball on lucid dreaming, the refuge of reading, and how lying is our stock-in-trade. | Chicago Magazine
• “I don’t know what we’re going to do if he goes up there and he’s already there.” A short story by Manuel Gonzales. | Oxford American
• “To take my place in the literary canon I would have to stoop lower than Whitman and Hemingway both.” Iris Smyles on hosting a national blurb contest for her most recent book. | The Paris Review

Also on Literary Hub: At the Qalandia Checkpoint: the Occupation’s humiliation machine, from Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to Spring · Los Angeles’ Feminist Library on Wheels delivers power to the people · A new poem by Rickey Laurentiis · The majesty of the purity of youth: from Jesse Armstrong’s Love, Sex, and Other Foreign Policy Goals

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