LitHub Daily: May 19, 2016

TODAY: In 1864, Nathaniel Hawthorne dies. 

• Announcing the 2016 O. Henry Prize stories, plus read six of the winning stories from Ottessa Moshfegh, Adrienne Celt, Robert Coover, and more. | Literary Hub
• Jason Diamond talks to Robin Wasserman about the jump from YA to adult, and the power of the teenage girl. | Literary Hub
• Bethanne Patrick’s picks 5 great beach reads for May, wherever you might be. | Literary Hub
• For mystery writer Karin Salvalaggio, the wilds of Montana might be the scariest character of all. | Literary Hub
• The unsung heroes of the poetry world: 11 poets on what it takes to run a small press. | Literary Hub
• “Anything an adverb does can almost always be done more elegantly by the adverbial deployment of the other parts of speech. Almost always more elegantly: in most cases with more elegance.” Christian Lorentzen argues against adverbs. | Vulture
• “You had just gotten so young/it was all I could do to contain you/in the linen dishtowel we kept for that purpose.” A poem by John Ashbery. | The Boston Review
• My characters, my avatars, dream of water, are drawn to its edge: Matthew Neill Null finds life in death on the edge of the Atlantic. | Guernica
• “Each morning, for about four months now, I am woken by the same foul, fat pigeon.” Faraaz Mahomed’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize-winning “The Pigeon.” | Granta
• How Hunter S. Thompson’s “honest-to-God Dexedrine-fueled anxiety attack” in Las Vegas germinated into Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. | American Short Fiction
• “There is such a stark cognitive dissonance at present—Black writers winning prestigious literary awards and facing watermelon jokes in the same moment, white editors wanting racial diversity while still publishing racist poems.” Casey Rocheteau on why she left The Offing. | The Offing
• Let us now further appreciate America’s appreciated-exactly-enough novelist, Charles Portis: Reflecting on Norwood, 50 years after its publication. | The Awl
• When Mieko tells the story, she concludes with this wonderment: A short story by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi. | Electric Literature

Also on Literary Hub: Lisa Levy on why we need more first-hand books about urban poverty · 10 books by women we’d like to see translated: Balkan edition · Alone in the bone zone: from Amy Rose Spiegel’s Action: A Book About Sex

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