LitHub Daily: May 2, 2016

TODAY: In 1936, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work in progress, Conversations at Midnight, is burned in a hotel fire on Sanibel Island, Florida. 

• Lydia Millet on bad B&Bs, writing as a single-parent, and the presidential elections. | Literary Hub
• How Billy Joel taught me to write. | Literary Hub
• Why literature needs psychology. | Literary Hub
• Live from the Edgars, crime writing’s big night, plus Walter Mosley’s lifetime acceptance speech from the awards. | Literary Hub
• Elizabeth Moss will star in a television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. | Hulu
• Chasing the shifting and changing and searching ghost of James Baldwin. | NYRB
• Walt Whitman’s rediscovered manifesto for manly health, which sounds “more than a little paleo,” will be published online. | The New York Times
• A buffalo hunt turned “clash between young civility and bloodthirsty evil:” On John Williams’s anti-Western, Butcher’s Crossing. | Public Books
• Like stepping back from the curb at the very last moment before being hit by a bus: Reading Hungarian writer Magda Szabó’s The Door. | The New Yorker
• This joy I have, the world didn’t give it to me: Jericho Brown on black joy and the feeling of writing. | The Boston Review
• “And then, one day, the Oulipo becomes a reality for me: ‘it’ invites me to a meeting.” Michèle Audin on meeting the exclusive literary group. | Publishers Weekly
• Navigating an unsteady ground with ease: On Warsan Shire, Lemonade, and the ties between poetry and music. | Pitchfork

Also on Literary Hub: Interview with a Bookstore: Book Culture · The life and times of a true American moral hysteric · The dead woman: from The Dove’s Necklace by Raja Alem, trans. from the Arabic by Katharine Halls and Adam Talib

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