LitHub Daily: November 1, 2016

TODAY: In 1604, Shakespeare’s Othello is performed for the first time, at Whitehall Palace in London. 

• From Kafka’s Prague to a clothing-optional retreat among the red woods, Peter Orner has some thoughts on life and loneliness. | Literary Hub
• Did you know that Javer Marías is technically the king of an uninhabited Caribbean micro-nation? He’s also a very good novelist. | Literary Hub
• What if Death was a young woman? On Neil Gaiman, Jose Saramago, and the way we gender the Grim Reaper. | Literary Hub
• Fanny Howe on race, family and the fine line between poetry and fiction.  | Literary Hub
• “I understood then, for the first time, that geography, language, society, politics, the whole history of a people, were for me in the books that I loved and which I could enter as if I were writing them.” An excerpt from Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia. | The New Yorker
• “How can I talk about them. The aliens, the form they chose to take.” A short story by Helen Phillips. | Tin House
• Having suffered disgrace, occasionally a public individual will sit for a documentary portrait: On Author: The J.T. LeRoy Story and Weiner. | VQR Online
• A tour of Marlon James’ conversation-inducing, plant-overrun loft. | The New York Times
• How much of this is autobiographical? Alexander Chee on what is demanded of writers, disappearing women, and the writing of Elena Ferrante. | New Republic
• It’s not, like, real life: Fiction by Rachel B. Glaser. | Granta
• The most recent issue of Words Without Borders features writing that “delivers a nuanced portrait of Thai culture and society.” | Words Without Borders
• Electric Literature is developing “a literary card game for the rude and well-read.” | Kickstarter

Also on Literary Hub: On Clarice Lispector, Alejandra Pizarnik, and poetic voice(lessness) · Five Books Making News: gambling, President Grant, and government · “The best advice I ever heard about poetry…” Read from Allen Morris Jones’ A Bloom of Bones

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