LitHub Daily: May 3, 2016

TODAY: In 1915, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, soldier, surgeon, artist, and poet, writes In Flanders Fields. 

• Fiction can still do anything it wants: Jennifer Egan on Don Delillo, and Don DeLillo on the life of a book. | Literary Hub
• Adam Haslett on the perpetual solitude  of the writer. | Literary Hub
• On Don DeLillo’s deep Italian-American roots. | Literary Hub
• Novel? Screenplay? Comic? How to choose the right medium for your story. | Literary Hub
• I have come to talk to you about the future: Enrique Vila-Matas on Rock n’ Roll, anti-artists, and finding his way into a new book. | Music & Literature
• “It’s freeing and interesting and liberatingto just decide that I don’t have to adhere to those rules.” An interview with Wendy Xu. | Divedapper
• Patricia Engel shares some of her “favorite novels of exile and dislocation,” from The Dew Breaker to The Last Illusion. | Electric Literature
• “I tried once to write a story about another galaxy, and it began to sound like Karachi.” On Pakistani writer and journalist Mohammed Hanif. | The New Yorker
• The final issue of Bookslut, including interviews with Ross Posnock, Esmé Weijun Wang, and more, has been published. | Bookslut
• “[Jacqueline] Susann’s representation of drugs was unrepentant, insistent, and determined to demonstrate the ubiquity of drug taking for women at the time.” Looking back at the bestselling cult classic Valley of the Dolls, 50 years after its publication. | Broadly
• “I just object when anyone gets too comfortable in a tradition and neglects to question all of its conventions every time they set out to do anything.” Karan Mahajan interviews Adam Ehrlich Sachs. | Bookforum
• Comic caper novels, psychological thrillers, and beyond: The top ten crime novels and best crime debuts of the year. | The Booklist Reader

Also on Literary Hub: Interview with a Library: The London Library · Books making news this week: legends, looting, and lambs · “Shelter” a story from Chris McCormick’s Desert Boys

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