LitHub Daily: November 20, 2015

TODAY: In 1936, Don DeLillo is born. Will win National Book Award Lifetime Achievement Medal a mere 79 years hence. 

• Paul Holdengraber calls Edwidge Danticat on the telephone, within minutes they’re talking all about death. | Literary Hub
• How Sophie Calle became an artist. | Literary Hub
• On the James Bond novel written by “Jonathan Franzen with a better sense of humour, a more concise Donna Tartt” (Kingsley Amis). | Hazlitt
• “There was only one thing we really had at the core of it: the death, the murder, the killing of my friend Prince Carmen Jones.” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s moving National Book Award acceptance speech. | Vulture
• “It made me want to throw up.” The rise of million-dollar bids on literary debuts. | The Wall Street Journal
• Strange house we must keep and fill: a poem by Tracy K. Smith. | The New Yorker
• “The whale as landfill. It was a metaphor, and then it wasn’t.” On watching a beached whale slowly suffer and die. | Granta
• “ATLiens made me love being black, Southern, celibate, sexy, awkward, free of drugs and alcohol, Grandmama’s grandbaby, and cooler than a polar bear’s toenails.” Kiese Laymon on discovering OutKast. | Oxford American
• “But what you really mean: it is you or I who always wants more.” Notes on love and violence. | Kenyon Review
• Facilitate more threads about David Foster Wallace: One brave troll’s quest to elevate Reddit conversations. | The Daily Dot

Also on Literary Hub: Blair Beusman barely survives 12 hours of Moby-Dick · Great novels written by poets · A brief, illustrated history of fog from Lauren Redniss · From Lindsay Hunter’s Ugly Girls, now available in paperback

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