LitHub Daily: October 3, 2016

TODAY: In 1867, Anthony Trollope tenders his resignation from his senior administrative position in the British General Post Office in order to write full-time. 

• Leave Elena Ferrante alone: David L. Ulin on the baffling impulse to unmask a beloved writer. | Literary Hub
• Naomi Extra on Love Jones and searching for black desire onscreen. | Literary Hub
• Ann Cleeves, master of the village noir. | Literary Hub
• “Where the hell do you start with something as vast as a memoir?” iO Tillet Wright on how to tell the story of a life. | Literary Hub
• “For Ferrante, an author’s absence merely restored the basic conditions of literature to the public: it enabled the writer to write and the reader to read.” Dayna Tortorici on the unmasking of Elena Ferrante. | n+1
• Love is central to my work: A profile of Mary Gaitskill. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• On The Handmaid’s Tale, which has revealed itself to be a “literary prophecy for the not-so-future state of women in America here and now.” | The Establishment
• On its 160th anniversary, reflecting on Madame Bovary, which “bequeathed a legacy of female Quixotes.” | The Guardian
• “We still live in a culture in which white people are very seldom stopped from doing anything they want to do, and when they are stopped or challenged, get extraordinarily upset about it.” Jess Row on writing across identity and the inherently political nature of the novel. | The New Republic
• How we remember war, and how we forget war: On Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies. | Public Books
• “It felt like we’d been out-Asianed by those who adopted traditions that my family had shed long ago.” Vanessa Hua on visiting a public bath. | Catapult
• “The president be like/we lost a young      boy today.” A poem by Morgan Parker. | The New York Times

Also on Literary Hub: Wachtung Bookseller, the best little bookstore in New Jersey · One story, two tellers: when someone else wrote the same book as me · I’m cracking apart: Eve Out Of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi, trans. by Jeffrey Zuckerman

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