LitHub Daily: October 19, 2015

TODAY: In 1938, writer Renata Adler is born in Milan, Italy.

• Kirk Lynn, a playwright who wrote a novel, can’t seem to choose between the two forms. | Literary Hub
• “Not only did I love everything she had written but I was passionate about her anonymity.” Elena Ferrante on Sense and Sensibility, a book by a lady. | The Guardian
• In honor of his birthday on Friday, reflections on Oscar Wilde, “one of the world’s most magical and compelling literary writers” and a total Libra. | The Irish Times
• “Where’s your fear of God, you mad beast?” On Oliver Ready’s nimble new translation of Dostoyevsky’s riven, raving Crime and Punishment. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• You, too, can search for belonging in a new video game inspired by the short stories of Haruki Murakami. | Hyperallergic
• From Walter Benjamin’s flâneur to today’s nearly extinct mallrat, a social history of the shopping mall. | Catapult
• On the continued relevance of Arthur Miller’s “art of the present tense.” | Biographile
• In defense of the book tour, an important opportunity for authors to become more than mere abstractions. | The Atlantic
• Never one for a straightforward narrative, David Lynch is writing/being written about in a memoir-biography hybrid. | The New York Times

Also on Literary Hub: An interview with Greenlight Books in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where Cesar Aira got to meet Cecil Taylor · Corrinne Manning is in awe of Alison Bechdel · An essay from Joseph Skibell: “To the derision of almost everyone I knew… I was teaching myself Esperanto.”

 

---