LitHub Daily: October 12, 2016

TODAY: In 1979, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is published. 

• Growing up under the Russians: Durs Grünbein remembers a childhood under occupation. | Literary Hub
• The top five contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature (according to gamblers): Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on his college years · Our love-hate relationship with Haruki Murakami · Adonis on the failure of the Arab Spring · Don DeLillo on the life of a book… | Literary Hub
• By us, for us: Garnette Cadogan digs into the phenomenon of New Orleans bounce. | Literary Hub
• Wu-Tang’s RZA on the mysterious land of Shaolin: Staten Island. | Literary Hub
• Bookselling in the 21st Century: on the difficulty of recommending books. | Literary Hub
• “Walking down the city streets, young women get harassed in ways that tell them that this is not their world, their city, their street.” Rebecca Solnit on the manscape that is New York City. | The New Yorker
• “I had more trepidation about writing in the first person than I did about writing about sex.” An interview with Emily Witt. | VICE
• On top of being a bestselling author, he has an unpaid career as a meme: A profile of Jonathan Safran Foer. | BuzzFeed
• Kristin Dombek on essays starting as arguments (“as in two people or groups shouting at each other”), the generosity and self-absorption of “I,” and the fetishization of empathy. | The Paris Review
• It metastasized into a story that encompassed the entire community: an interview with Brit Bennett. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Presenting a familiar drama, in which a clever man outs a female writer (but not the one you think). | Public Books
• One speaks with a scorched tongue: Rion Amilcar Scott and Bro. Yao in conversation. | The Critical Flame
• “When I started writing poems, there was something really intuitive about it and very satisfying. I started feeling like, ‘Oh, this is the thing I have to do.’” Kaveh Akbar talks with Anaïs Duplan. | Divedapper

Also on Literary Hub: The man who lived the tragic tale of my book: surviving the Armenian genocide, 100 years later, in Vermont. · Five of the world’s great bookstores, illustrated · A good man to know: from Patrick Hoffman’s Every Man A Menace · We were getting divorced, and that was that: from Danielle Trussoni’s The Fortress

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