LitHub Daily: May 4, 2015

TODAY: In 1948,Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published

• An interview with Paul Beatty on his new novel and “still-racial” satire. | Literary Hub
• “I thought, ‘This is a rather interesting landscape.’ Particularly the panting ogres.” In The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro expands a single Arthurian stanza into a novel. | Guernica
• Cat’s Cradle will be adapted for television, further entwining the universal karass of Vonnegut fans. | Hollywood Reporter
• Earth’s first selfie: on how images of the earth revolutionize our self-perception. | NYRB
• The end will continue to be nigh: on apocalyptic literature’s bright future. | NPR
• The meet cute to end all meet cutes (involving $11,000 worth of cocaine and a police chase) yielded America’s most successful literary couple. | T Magazine
• Mass surveillance and racial discrimination, two timeworn American traditions, united in J. Edgar Hoover’s ghostreading. | Politico
• Sorry, John Colapinto, it seems that American publishers aren’t into novels about incest, assault, and pedophilia. | The Globe and Mail
• Salman Rushdie as Voltaire, but with a Twitter. | The Guardian
• Stories were certainly not the only creepy and morbid remnants Edgar Allan Poe left behind; people enthusiastically collect little bits of his hair. | Atlas Obscura
• An Occidentalist spy story: The Sympathizer subverts both its genre and American perceptions of the Vietnam War. |  The New Inquiry
• It’s going to be OK: paying $3,000 to waste time on the internet (and perhaps dismantle a model of higher education) with Kenneth Goldsmith. | Slate

 

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