LitHub Daily: November 17, 2015

• A brief history of pet cemeteries, rituals, and how we mourn our dead pets. | Literary Hub
• Lauren Groff on the politics at play in her NBA-nominated book, Fates and Furies. | Literary Hub
• “You’re just going with the usual all-American fantasy? You don’t wish to banish any memory of the dead?” A short story by Ann Beattie. | The New Yorker
• “I want, with all my heart, to preserve and celebrate what ISIS wishes to destroy: a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural life.” Laila Lalami responds to the attacks in Paris, Beirut, and around the world. | The Nation
• If you, too, find yourself “often asking dance artist Haddaway’s timeless question, ‘What is love?’” – a new issue of The Scofield may help clarify. | The Scofield
• “When I was little, my Mom had only one fear—that I’d grow up to be ordinary.” Short fiction by Etgar Keret. | Electric Literature
• “The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative.” An interview with Brian Boyd. | Guernica
• Don DeLillo’s new novel, Zero K, will tackle eternal life (and be published in May). | LA Times
• “I think [experimentation] should be used in order to make things, to expose things, and make them more legible.” Franny Choi on conceptual, slam, love, and empire-destroying poems. | Divedapper
• The Oxford Dictionary, which brought language to its knees by declaring “selfie” and “vape” to be the words of the past two years, has officially declared it dead. | Newsweek

Also on Literary Hub: In praise of Georges Perec’s infraordinary Paris · Five books making news this week: Beatles, soldiers, and love letters · In Jakarta, 1968, from Leila S. Chudori’s debut novel, Home