LitHub Daily: November 30, 2016

TODAY: In 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens is born. 

• Gabrielle Bellot considers a deeply divided America, and how to find empathy in the face of hate. | Literary Hub
• Robert Macfarlane on the inexhaustible gift that is a book. | Literary Hub
• Harlem’s Revolution Books: on the front lines of radical resistance, one book at a time. | Literary Hub
• The legendary woodswoman of the Adirondacks: on Anne LaBastille, America’s feminist Thoreau. | Literary Hub
• Keep in view how and why we’ve come so far: On Albert Murray’s “blues idiom worldview” and reconstructions of American identity. | New Republic
• “No other American writer since William Faulkner, and perhaps Philip Roth… has made such a determined effort to create a universe out of a community, to transform everyday biographies into epic history.” On John Edgar Wideman’s most recent book. | The Nation
• The scale of individual lives in the Anthropocene: On The Argonauts, A Little Life, and the problem of futurity. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Embedded within Vance’s many first-person plural appeals to the white working class is a set of racial assumptions that readers would do well to interrogate.” On the false lessons offered in Hillbilly Elegy. | The New Inquiry
• She likes ignoring reality: A collaborative novella by Shelly Oria & Alice Sola Kim. | WeTransfer
• “Unlike bad sex, which is often obviously recognizable, bad sex writing can be hard to define.” Talking with the spokesperson of the Bad Sex Awards about where erotic literature frequently goes wrong. | Broadly
• It’s not quite as relaxing as it looks: What it takes to open an independent bookstore. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Interview with a Gatekeeper: Talking to OR’s Colin Robinson · Steven Church on the ecstasy of a bear attack · Read from Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Nineveh.

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