LitHub Daily: May 18, 2016

TODAY: In 1910, Polish novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa dies. 

• What does it mean when we call women girls? Robin Wasserman on the unstoppable wave of “girl”-titled books. | Literary Hub
• Salman Rushdie on memorizing poetry, being a reader, and going to the movies: part two of his conversation with Paul Holdengraber. | Literary Hub
• How writers will steal your life and use it for fiction: a brief history of plagiarizing identity, from Leo Tolstoy to (ahem) Salman Rushdie. | Literary Hub
• Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Mongrels, will read pretty much anything featuring werewolves. | Literary Hub
• “It was a crazy compost heap, according to not only myself.” Rivka Galchen on writing Little Labors, deploying sadness, and the cat bus. | Electric Literature
• “And that moment has never left me as the symbolic moment of my understanding that this was our place in an American war, that the Vietnam War was an American war from the American perspective and that, eventually, I would have to do something about that.” An interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen. | NPR
• In the conspiracy to end all conspiracies, Jonathan “Jon” Franzen was on Jeopardy and one of the categories was birds (but somehow he still didn’t win). | Vulture
• “Everything that happens in it happened first in life, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a memoir.” Chris Kraus on I Love Dick. | The Guardian
• On Roberto Calasso’s The Art of the Publisher, which details a dangerous, limited, world-creating art. | Public Books
• “My critics are at liberty to claim that I’m trying to convert children to Satanism. And I’m free to explain that I’m exploring human nature and morality, or to say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ depending on which side of the bed I got out of that day.” J.K. Rowling’s PEN Literary Service Award acceptance speech. | Wall Street Journal
• Sara Majka on being a short story purist, emotional resolve, and the importance of motion. | Ploughshares
• “Don’t even bother trying! You’ll only end up hating either your partner, your children, your job, or yourself, or some unholy combination of the above.” Rumaan Alam on (not) having it all. | The Cut

Also on Literary Hub: Otto Penzler’s 5 mystery picks for May · 10 books to help you understand Brazil · Four new poems by Stephen Burt · The make-believe muse: from The Sky Over Lima by Juan Gómez Bárcena, translated by Andrea Rosenberg

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