Lit Hub Daily: June 3, 2016

TODAY: In 1924, Franz Kafka dies. 

• Helen Phillips on body image, motherhood, and owning your idiosyncratic self. | Literary Hub
• Secrets of the book designer: sometimes I don’t read the whole book (and that’s OK). | Literary Hub
• Jose Orduña on the hollow spectacle of attaining American citizenship. | Literary Hub
• “I personally feel that no one gives a shit about my books—maybe I’m just a pessimist—and that idea feels horrible and refreshing at the same time.” A conversation between Ottessa Moshfegh and Daniel Saldaña París, descendants of the same galaxy. | BOMB Magazine
• John Keene on writing against master narratives, radical freedom and unfreedom, and building stories from the ground up. | KCRW
• “Some things are better expressed in Spanish, and when you have access to two languages, or more, it’s natural to reach fluidly for whatever words best convey what you’re feeling.” An interview with Patricia Engel. | Electric Literature
• The Feminist Press and TAYO Literary Magazine have announced the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize “seeking the best debut books by women and nonbinary writers of color.” | TAYO Literary Magazine
• A sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation: Janet Malcolm on the more recent translation of Anna Karenina. | NYRB
• “There remains something mildly and even pleasurably heretical about the way the Boxcar Children locate the outer limits of amusement in decorous productivity.” Jia Tolentino on The Boxcar Children as a capitalist parable. | The New Yorker
• Ben Lerner, Marguerite Duras, Robin Wasserman, and more: highly anticipated books coming out this month. | Flavorwire, BuzzFeed Books
• Using the most reliable source of information available (the stars), a group of astronomers and a physicist have dated one of Sappho’s poems. | Hyperallergic

Also on Literary Hub: Yahdon Israel on why hardcover is the new vinyl · Beyond Elena Ferrante: 10 Italian books by women we’d love to see in English · Tomorrow’s mission: from Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier

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