LitHub Daily: June 9, 2015

TODAY: In 1790, The Philadelphia Spelling Book by John Barry becomes the first book copyrighted in the United States. 

• Laird Hunt on writing gender identity in historical fiction. | Literary Hub
• “How could a book with a cover that beautiful have an author photo that ugly?” Amanda Filipacchi poses like a man, claims a small victory for women writers everywhere. | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• César Aira, who understands that genies, devils, and editors alike are inextricably bound by their word, would use time travel to perfect his (sex) life. | The New Yorker
• “What’s natural about a midget with a cable hanging from his belly button popping out of your wife’s vagina?” An excerpt from Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years. | Omnivoracious
• In which Alejandro Jodorowsky waxes poetic about the importance and potency of love, berates his family, and assures us that humanity will be telepathic in 200 years. | The Quietus
• “The essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration.” Chigozie Obioma in defense of prose that calls attention to itself. | The Millions
• The first horseman of the literary apocalypse is probably this article earnestly insisting that a 23-year-old’s Instagram is a valid form of memoir. | Mic
• Kathleen Ossip on confronting death, Sylvia Plath, and what poetry is “about.” | The Brooklyn Rail
• Authors are shadowy, aura-creating figures of whom we are vaguely aware and by whom we are enthralled (so basically, wizards). | NYRB
• Five poems by Carl Adamshick, which make even feeding mosquitoes seem beautiful. | Electric Literature

Also on Literary Hub: At the heart of the Dallas literary scene · “I met Jim Shepard in the most un-Shepard-like circumstances” · Nabokov in America

 

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