LitHub Daily: October 21, 2016

TODAY: In 1929, Ursula K. Le Guin is born. 

• On travel memoirs by black women writers: Nneka Okona on books that brought her comfort and courage.| Literary Hub
• From Weimar to Appalachia, a syllabus for our brush with fascism.| Literary Hub
• Inside the world of judging the Man-Booker Prize: on reading a book a day and facing the wrath of the shortlist. | Literary Hub
• How to tell if you’re a Southern writer or a Brooklyn writer… | Literary Hub
• “The subjects—boxing, crime, the Vietnam War—may have been ‘gritty,’ but the experience of reading his work is unfailingly buoyant, uplifting.” Joyce Carol Oates on the writing of Thom Jones, who died last Friday. | The New Yorker
• John Irving and Nathan Hill discuss a love of dysfunction, authenticity and failure in protests, and American exceptionalism. | Hazlitt
• “I always want my books to be a kind of couch. You read a few pages in the late afternoon, fall asleep, and have a memorable dream.” An interview with Eliot Weinberger. | Tin House
• John Reed on a sonnet’s resemblance to a short story, writing without a net, and the conflict between identity and love. | BOMB Magazine
• Join me and my sidekick, Sandwich, as we visit some of my personal alcoholic bottom hot spots: Michelle Tea revisits Los Angeles, 15 years later. | BuzzFeed Reader
• “If I’m afraid of anything as a writer, it’s of becoming frivolous and self-indulgent, especially since I spend so much time alone in a room making stuff up.” An interview with Allegra Hyde. | Electric Literature
• “While we know that the overwhelming majority of black women did not transgress social boundaries in the ways that Hannah Mary Tabbs did, her existence, nonetheless, maps the extremities.” An interview with Kali Nicole Gross. | Public Books
• Capital D her: How Charles Dickens “politely wiggle[d] his way out of that very tight corset of Victorian censorship.” | The Millions

Also on Literary Hub: “A Little Customer Service,” a story by Lori Ostlund · A.I.: the apocalypse we can’t even see · Music for living, poems for surviving: from A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist

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