LitHub Daily: March 25, 2016

TODAY: In 1925, of Flannery O’Connor is born; proceeds to win best daughter award for writing to her mother every day of graduate school. 

• The first rule of novel-writing is don’t write a novel: Elizabeth Percer’s nine non-rules for writing. | Literary Hub
• Kwame Dawes on rhythm, diaspora, and political poetry. | Literary Hub
• Catalan writer Toni Sala travels 50,000 kilometers back and forth and to America, is unimpressed. | Literary Hub
• “What is the black body but an aching tone?” An homage to Glenn Ligon by Dawn Lundy Martin. | Open Space
• Karan Mahajan on flying while brown, unshaven, and carrying a manuscript entitled The Association of Small Bombs. | Catapult
• Greater than is the pain not to say: On Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 novel, Dictée. | Uncovered Classics
• “A strange story, but this is a strange country.” John Jeremiah Sullivan on the “twisted past” and “ambitious revival” of Shuffle Along, one of the first successful all-black Broadway musicals. | The New York Times Magazine
• Lynn Steger Strong on what makes someone a writer, spewing feelings into a Word document, and saying goodbye to characters you love. | Electric Literature
• Debut novelist Saleem Haddad and literary translator Thoraya El-Rayyes discuss Generic American Liberals, the Western gaze, and the pretense of weakness. | Apogee Journal
• Parnassus Books now has a traveling bookmobile filled with 1,000 books (and four beautiful dogs). | The New York Times
• “A literary text is not defined by its relation to truth or imagination.” Is the dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction itself a fiction? | The Guardian

Also on Literary Hub: Page to Screen: Roxane Gay heads to Hollywood! · Who will win Bookstore of the Year? · Never interrupt: from Jung Yun’s Shelter

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