LitHub Daily: October 7, 2016

TODAY: In 1955, Allen Ginsberg reads from “Howl” for the first time at Six Gallery. 

• Junot Díaz: “On my way to the novel, I fell in love with the short story.” | Literary Hub
• How the Yugoslav wars shaped a generation of writers: Lidija Dimkovska on the other lost generation. | Literary Hub
• The literature of creepy clowns: if they’re coming, you might as well be prepared… | Literary Hub
• On research, google maps, and the importance of landscape: Tracy Chevalier and Paulette Jiles in conversation. | Literary Hub
• “Nothing other than seeing a ghost has been as instrumental in my thinking about the materiality of the shared imagination and its importance in poetry.” Dorothea Lasky on encounters with spirits and poetics. | JSTOR Daily
• Claire Messud on the “rarely serene but always memorable” portraits of Alice Neel. | NYR Daily
• Will the Nobel Prize in Literature go to “pasta fetishist” Haruki Murakami, “Norwegian cigarette smoker” Karl Ove Knausgaard, or someone else? | The New Republic
• “When I was writing [The Story of a Brief Marriage] there was no question of redemption or coming back, there was no question of time after this time.” An interview with Anuk Arudpragasam. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• On the detective fiction of Philip Kerr, which “makes bad behavior look bad again.” | The New Yorker
• “Reparations begin in the body, and that is where our poems must begin.” Harmony Holiday on the need for ruthless black poetry. | Harriet
• This is a fairy tale about a bookshop: Yiyun Li on her first encounter with a bookstore. | Granta
• “I have come to wonder if, perhaps, for women, author photos are too often a lose-lose situation.” Marie Myung-Ok Lee on the portraits and privacy of writers. | The Millions

Also on Literary Hub: Can fiction still make a difference? · Craig Larson on historical fiction, true stories, and not recreating reality · “I’m going in”: from Andria Williams’s The Longest Night, now available in paperback

---