LitHub Daily: May 6, 2016

TODAY: In 1940, John Steinbeck is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath. 

• Why does literature hate babies? Rivka Galchen on the sometimes reciprocal hostility between writing and children. | Literary Hub
• Motherhood vs. Art: on having a child as a woman writer (there is no wrong choice). | Literary Hub
• Reading (and writing) through the loss of a mother. | Literary Hub
• “It’s funny, I have a very dim memory of White Noise. I’ve never had reason to re-read it.” An interview with Don DeLillo. | The Millions
• Ta-Nehisi Coates will publish two new books with the newly launched One World imprint, one of which will be a work of fiction. | The Associated Press
• Karl Ove Knausgaard on being a “cultural man,” reading women, and writing an almost evil book. | Men’s Journal
• More complicated than a flowering of one eccentric and filthy man’s erotic imagination: On John Cleland’s (very) erotic novel, Fanny Hill. | The Paris Review
• Josephine Livingstone will now provide “dispatches from the strangest corners of academia” at the Awl. | The Awl
• On forgotten writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who “wrote some of the most compelling and heartbreaking stories about the color line in America.” | The Toast
• More than just jolly hard work: On the “abundant metaphoric range” and literary prominence of gardens. | Financial Times
• “This year I’m going to put on a big outfit and go to a party.” Zadie Smith on attending the Met Ball and what we can expect from her next novel (“tap dancing, black women, money, poverty, sadness and joy”). | Refinery29

Also on Literary Hub: Why writers shouldn’t boycott North Carolina bookstores · On discovering real mothers on the page · No to the fetal monitoring belt: From Pamela Erens’s Eleven Hours

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