LitHub Daily: November 18, 2015

TODAY: In 1939, Margaret Atwood is born; here she is in 1966. Happy birthday! 

• Robert Hughes on how Andrew Wyeth’s “secret” Helga paintings triggered an unprecedented media frenzy. | Literary Hub
• Rebecca Solnit on 80 books (give or take) no woman should read (inspired by that Esquire list that just… won’t… die…). | Literary Hub
• “The instant a novel is opened and a reader begins to read, the remoteness between writer and reader dissolves.” Karl Ove Knausgaard on the novel’s ability to define the indefinite other. | The New Yorker
• The boundaries are necessarily hazy: Valeria Luiselli on fiction vs. non-fiction, the separate realms of her works, and the blurring of fiction and life. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
• Claudia Rankine on making research into a transparent reality, the value of MFAs, and the importance of feeling to a poet. | The Spectacle
• “Every time I sit down to write I dare the universe. I dare my own death.” An interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths. | PEN America
• “I tried first person, second person, third person, past tense, present tense, future tense and eventually I just decided to fuck it all in there.” Kevin Barry discusses his Goldsmiths Prize-winning, John Lennon-starring novel, Beatlebone. | Electric Literature
• On the existential shudder inspired by the thought of never having encountered Barbara Comyns. | The Barnes & Noble Review
• An urgent need to speak, a claim to honesty, and a sort of wisdom: Lorin Stein enumerates the qualities he looks for in fiction, crystallized in Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” | The Atlantic
• A professor has uncovered Germaine Greer’s 30,000-word, “Herzogian outpouring of the soul” to Martin Amis. | The New York Times

Also on Literary Hub: David Mitchell’s advice to a young writer · An interview with James Patterson, winner of this year’s National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award · NBA-finalist Karen E. Bender’s favorite short stories · At the 40th anniversary of the Pushcart Prizes · Partying with the youth at the NBA’s 5 Under 35 · Bryan Hurt’s “Contract” · From Simon Critchley’s Memory Theater

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