LitHub Daily: May 23, 2016

• Dale Peck on the art and writing of the 1980s (hint: the 90s ruined everything). | Literary Hub
• When my authentic is your exotic: Sonia Kamal agonizes over whether or not to have a mango in her novel. | Literary Hub
• Prelude to a friendship: Paul Lisicky remembers the moment he met a lifelong friend. | Literary Hub
• The anti-HB2 book tour: day one, Garrard Conley and Garth Greenwell read at Scuppernong Books in North Carolina. | Literary Hub
• “[P]rivilege meant partly the idea that you didn’t have to think constantly about race, or class or gender. I see this book as an attempt to look at all those three things together.” An interview with Margo Jefferson and excerpt from Negroland. | The Guardian
• Presenting a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices: Lucy Ives on Margaret the First and other works of “archival fiction.” | The New Yorker
• “I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts and words.” On the work of newly minted Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich. | The New York Times
• C.E. Morgan on moral beauty, permissible vs. non-permissible speech, and the primary gift of the animal. | Commonweal Magazine
• “Dillard never meant to let the reader breathe; she wants us to hold it for 270 and a half pages.” On the fast and furious prose of Annie Dillard. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Battling problems of infiltration, of sewage, and degraded walls: On restoring the Qarawiyyin Library, which was founded more than a millennium ago. | NPR
• Tracy O’Neill on algorithms, #RIPinstagram, and the literature of the queue. | Catapult
• Thou doth love, and the other most common words used in poetry. | My Poetic Side

Also on Literary Hub: Interview with a Bookstore: Galiano Island Bookstore · The library the Gold Rush built: on the Mechanics’ Institute of San Francisco · The new kid: from Benjamin Wood’s The Ecliptic