LitHub Daily: October 16, 2015

ON SUNDAY: In 1851, Moby-Dick is published; 164 years later, Literary Hub has its inaugural Whale Day.

• There once was a dildo in Nantucket—specifically, a 120-year-old “he’s-at-home” (plaster dildo) found in a chimney. Let us explain. | Literary Hub
• In what we could have told you weeks ago, The Kirkus Prizes went to Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hanya Yanagihara. |  Kirkus Reviews
• Jessa Crispin on the feeling of exile, parsing apart the Great Male Genius, and the loaded term “ladies.” | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Susan Howe roams, remembers Wallace Stevens, ruminates on the letter R. | The Nation
• Excerpts from John Cage’s never-before-published diary, an homage to chance and precursor to Microsoft WordArt. | Guernica
• Joshua Cohen discusses his live-written serial novel, “an exercise in increasing ego by destroying ego” through “multicolor scrolling hate-speech.” | The Believer Logger
• Reconstructing the history of Alice James, who was “so much more than someone’s sister.” | The American Scholar
• Richard Grant on finally understanding the language of Faulkner when he moved from London to Mississippi. | Biographile
• On Joseph Roth’s collected feuilletons, a “short, subjective, and eclectic” form of journalism wholly foreign to today’s readers. | The Millions

Also on Literary Hub: In praise of Melville’s whale chapters · A beautiful whale from Johanna Basford’s forthcoming adult coloring book · A literary history of these beautiful behemoths · The impossibly cool book covers of Roy Kuhlman · From Joshua Horwitz’s  PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award-winning War of the Whales, finding Moby Doll, the original blackfish

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