LitHub Daily: June 8, 2016

TODAY: In 1880, Fyodor Dostoevsky delivers a speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow, which was, reportedly, much better than the speech Turgenev gave. 

• What my parents really think about my memoir of alcoholism: Sarah Hepola interviews her mother and father. | Literary Hub
• Alain de Botton on Voltaire, twitter, and commercial culture: part two of his conversation with Paul Holdengraber. | Literary Hub
• The true, tragic tale of the Angola Three: a graphic history of the lives of Albert Woodfox, Robert Hillary King, and Herman Wallace. | Literary Hub
• How rebel ex-punk Stona Fitch became gritty crime writer Rory Flynn. | Literary Hub
• The Lambda Literary Award winners were announced; winners include Chinelo Okparanta, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Hasan Namir. | Lambda Literary
• “I had the urge to keep the Maupassant stories for myself, to figure them out on my own, to let their author speak directly to me.” Sloane Crosley remembers the first time she read “The Necklace.” | The Paris Review
• It pushes its way out from the gut: Masha Gessen on Italian graphic novelist Igort’s The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks. | NYRB
• “Should not writers and artists, sculptors and musicians and others in the arts pay attention to the great events of their time?” An interview with Annie Proulx. | The Wall Street Journal
• Rumaan Alam on the book as a baby metaphor, being accidentally zeitgeisty, and almost buying a container of pineapple from Whole Foods. | The Millions
• Investigating the axis of hunger, sex, and death: On recent books that use the female body as a “Rorschach test for society’s deeper anxieties about women’s roles.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Speaking with five “Somali-British poets keeping the lyrical oral tradition of their ancestors alive.” | BuzzFeed News
• “As much as my Wired archive is a document of its era’s aspirations, it’s also a record of what people once hoped technology would be.” On reading early issues of Wired. | The New Yorker

Also on Literary Hub: 10 books to read for pride month · Otto Penzler recommends crime and mystery · Groceries before the Feds come: from Victoria Fedden’s This is Not My Beautiful Life

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