LitHub Daily: November 3, 2016

TODAY: In 1966, the flooding of the Arno River in Florence causes severe damage to the contents of libraries including the National Central Library and Gabinetto Vieusseux. 

• Mychal Denzel Smith puts together a black boy literary survival kit. First step: Audre Lorde. | Literary Hub
• Lewis Lapham: So you say you want a revolution, but is that what you really mean? | Literary Hub
• The last time the Cubs won the World Series, William Saroyan was a month old: 1908, the year in books | Literary Hub
• Racism on the playground: Susan Straight on raising biracial daughters. | Literary Hub
• “With or without permission, the writing sucks the reader into its orbit, and there one remains to the end.” Vivian Gornick on Elena Ferrante. | The Nation
• Make fiction fun again: On the “literary brat pack” of the 80s: Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Donna Tartt and Jill Eisenstadt. | Harper’s Bazaar
• Writing “fierce women who could be as intimidating as they are intriguing:” Roxane Gay on her Marvel comic series. | EW
• A few years ago, God gave me a birthday present: Emma Straub on seeing the New Kids on the Block. | Tin House
• “The world feels so endlessly permanent, and yet people have always been preparing for the apocalypse.” An interview with Michelle Tea. | BOMB Magazine
• Mauro Javier Cardenas on the performance of interiority, forging a world through syntax, and disfiguring language. | Words Without Borders
• “I had to find a form that could polychromatically meet the charged, protean appetites of my characters’s emotional needs.” An interview with Vi Khi Nao. | Electric Literature
• Feeling a sense of transgression is very valuable artistically because it puts a kind of pressure and energy behind the words: An interview with April Ayers Lawson. | BLARB

Also on Lit Hub: D. Foy talks violence, patriarchy, and Patricide · Guess which candidate really loves Clan of the Cave Bear ·  Read from Wendy C. Ortiz’s Bruja

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