LitHub Daily: March 23, 2016

• Why I chose to write in English: Ayelet Tsabari on the power of a foreign language. | Literary Hub
• Shirley Barrett goes deep into domestic research, learns how to be a whaler’s wife in 1908 (boil everything, wash the clothes in gin). | Literary Hub
• The suicide note as literary genre: on the last words of Woolf, Koestler, Berryman, and more. | Literary Hub
• And then there was Wallace Stevens: On the new 400-page biography on the 400-word life of a revolutionary American poet. | The Atlantic
• “I wanted to show how idealism can be bent and corrupted to the point that you’d willingly kill civilians for an idea.” An interview with Karan Mahajan. | Electric Literature
• On poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers’s legacy and “idea of belgitude,” considered in the aftermath of the Brussels attacks. | The New Yorker
• “My model for writing fiction is to replicate the feeling of a dream in some way—I want it to have the emotional intensity you feel in a dream.” An interview with kind of crybaby Daniel Clowes. | Longreads
• The newly founded Lulu Fund presents its findings on inclusiveness in academia, which are (sadly, unsurprisingly) not great. | Salon
• How to approach the widely known yet infrequently read Dante, 750 years after his birth. | The American Scholar
• On Is that Kafka?: 99 Finds, a “textual cabinet of curiosities” that creates both feelings of closeness to and distance from the enigmatic writer. | The New Republic
• A list of 25 essential occult books (beyond your personal Book of Shadows). | Flavorwire

Also on Literary Hub: Who is the man behind Nein Quarterly? Paul Holdengraber calls Eric Jarosinski on the telephone · The Grumpy Librarian goes essay-wild! · Whaling: from Ian McGuire’s The North Water