LitHub Daily: May 6, 2015

TODAY: In 1862, Henry David Thoreau died, leaving behind 24,750 bean plants.

• Photographer and memoirist Sally Mann does, in fact, have a file called “Maternal Slights,” where she “wrote all my mother’s slights down. There were so many of them.” | Literary Hub
• Buried at the end of this piece about last night’s PEN Awards (as she was at the awards themselves), is another honoree, Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative journalist imprisoned in Azerbaijan for her reporting on government corruption, though “few [guests] mustered the same enthusiasm” to celebrate her award. | The Guardian, Radio Free Europe
• In what may soon become the plot of a Nicolas Cage film, scholars have uncovered over 100 previously unread stories written by Mark Twain. | BuzzFeed
• In what may soon become the plot of a Nicolas Cage sequel, a $60,000 edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude was stolen from the International Book Fair in Bogota. | BBC
• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: on the connection and resonances between Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln. | The New York Times
• Is it possible to make a good film about writing? And why is Wim Wenders trying with James Franco, of all people? | New Statesman
• Chipotle, Cultivators of Thought, will begin double-wrapping their burritos (the second wrap is a wrap of words). | LA Times
• “There were four kinds of things like him in this world: men, women, animals, and ghosts.” An excerpt from, and review of, B. Catling’s The Vorrh. | NPR
• In stark contrast to most everyone’s experience, Julian Barnes didn’t “get” art until he encountered modernism. | The Guardian
• An excerpt from Tim Parks’s Where I’m Reading From, in which he questions writing, reading, and literary value. | Flavorwire
• An introduction to introductions (and forewords, and prefaces). | The Millions
• “Now I haven’t read your book, but I very much look forward to doing so.” Filed to: BAN MEN. | Gawker Review of Books

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