LitHub Daily: November 10, 2015

• Raymond Chandler’s biographer on the man who cared little for plot (but loved a good simile more than anything). | Literary Hub
• “Read promiscuously. Imitate. Become your own voice. Sing.” Colum McCann’s advice for a young writer. | The Story Prize
• Disentangling themes “from the debris of neglect, poverty, and policy in the face of a disaster that was only partially natural:” On the post-earthquake Haitian novel. | The Critical Flame
• On the meteoric rise and “rad” reception of Instapoets, today’s best selling, celebrity poets. | The New York Times
• Who doesn’t bump into Hamlet along the path to maturity? On transforming Shakespeare’s plays into novels. | The New Yorker
• Visiting the aggressively twee cabins of digital visionary Eli Horowitz, former publisher of McSweeney’s and reconceptualizer of the novel. | BuzzFeed Books
• Finding home in the homeless poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. | Hyperallergic
• On the elder Vonnegut, who discovered how to control the weather and inspired his younger brother to write sci-fi. | Work in Progress
• The sacred act of reading vs. the calculating machines of modernity: On “distant reading” and the loss of literature’s enchanted status. | The Hedgehog Review

Also on Literary Hub: The origin stories of 21 indie presses (and the books that started it all) · Scott Esposito travels to a literary festival in Krakow, sees Franzen everywhere · Five books making news this week: money, magical realists and Mark Twain · What Jane Austen adaptation from the 90s should you watch? An illustrated guide · Another edition of Spinglish-English translation: Friday’s Debate Forum · Victor Sebestyen on the refugees of 1946