LitHub Daily: May 5, 2016

TODAY: In 1816, the first published poem by John Keats (age 20) appears in The Examiner. 

• Lydia Millet on why love is boring and hard to write about, and yet… | Literary Hub
• What is the writer’s place in a violent world? Maaza Mengiste on Chinua Achebe. | Literary Hub
• The 10 Russian literary heroines you should know. | Literary Hub
• The sustenance of song and historical clapbacks: Adam Fitzgerald interviews Tyehimba Jess. | Literary Hub
• Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, translated from the Spanish by Lisa   Dillman, and Angélica Freitas’s Rilke Shake, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan, have won the  Best Translated Book Awards. | The Millions
• “I seem to have gone to dances and been photographed in pretty dresses, and also as a pom-pom girl. I seemed to have been a bridesmaid rather a lot. I seem always to have been ‘the editor’ or the ‘president.’” Some notes on California by Joan Didion. | NYRB
• On the linguistic innovations of Charles Dickens, who invented such invaluable words as podsnappery and gamp. | JSTOR Daily
• Tania James on the bizarreness of trunks, the prevalence of bad guys, and flexing both the tragic and the comic muscles. | The Rumpus
• “Every time I’m writing something, my main concern is to overcome the walls of my language, my nationality, my culture, to reach out to people.” An interview with Christos Ikonomou. | Ploughshares
• On Lee Konstantinou’s Cool Characters, ironic distancing, and meta Pepsi ads. | The Point
• I must expose myself to the rough terrain: Poetry by Vidhu Aggarwal, illustrated by Bishakh Som. | Boston Review
• On the rise of all-male book clubs, some of which are so secure in their masculinity that they refuse to read books by or about women. | The New York Times

Also on Literary Hub: Matthew Griffin: notes from my book tour · On the $50K acid trip that inspired the Grateful Dead’s “Black Peter” · My former boss: from Camille Perri’s The Assistants

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