LitHub Daily: October 27, 2016

TODAY: In 1940, author Maxine Hong Kingston is born. 

• Marilynne Robinson laments America’s vanishing culture of generosity. | Literary Hub
• Junot Diaz on telling the stories of the dead, and the joys of teaching the young. | Literary Hub
• Are you an Anne Shirley or an Emily Starr? In praise of L. M. Montgomery’s lesser-loved heroine. | Literary Hub
• Emily Witt on love, sex, and orgasmic meditation. | Literary Hub
• Erroll Morris on the time he filmed Donald Trump missing the point, part two. | Literary Hub
• Reading Baldwin, of course, changed everything: Hilton Als and Jacqueline Goldsby in conversation. | The Paris Review
• Philip Roth’s collection of over 4,000 books will be moved to and housed in the Newark Public Library, providing “not a window into Mr. Roth’s mind exactly, but physical evidence of the eclectic writers who helped shape it.” | The New York Times
• On Sarah Waters’ abortion scenes, “at once warnings about the threat illicit abortions pose to women’s bodies and reminders of the long history of reading women’s sexual acts and appetites as dangerous or corrosive.” | n+1
• “To fully appreciate the majority of Springsteen’s work, the listener needs to engage emotionally with the characters he creates.” On Bruce Springsteen’s use of empathy as a political tool. | The Times Literary Supplement
• Visiting the archives of Angela Carter, “a lifelong believer in writing as a public, material art form.” | The London Review of Books
• “Sometimes history is a burden for writers of color—opportunities to convey meaningful visions of the past are so rare that they must, it sometimes seems, be rendered carefully and comprehensively.” Hua Hsu on The Fortunes and invisibility. | The New Yorker
• “Fiction can feel much more wide open and thus more daunting—a blank page on the computer as big as the world.” An interview with Vanessa Hua. | BLARB
• Yet still, I named him: An excerpt from Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne. | Entertainment Weekly

Also on Literary Hub: Bob Eckstein is feeling good about bookshops · Male Victorian writers attempt to understand women and sex, fail · Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize: From A. L. Kennedy’s Serious Sweet

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