LitHub Daily: October 9, 2015

• Alice Randall thinks The Southern Festival of Books is better than Christmas. | Literary Hub
• Why the Nobel Prize deservedly went to Svetlana Alexievich, emotional excavator, genre inventor, and fourteenth woman recipient. | The New Yorker
• In what will assuredly mean something to conspiracy theorists somewhere, Elena Ferrante is writing the introduction to a new edition of Sense and Sensibility. | Flavorwire
• In Jonathan Franzen’s novels, politics have become “alternatively a Garden of Eden or a haunted house.” | The Nation
• In which a former 24-year-old Brooklyn book nerd (Peter Nowogrodzki) and more than a literary meme (Ottessa Moshfegh) recount the past, work through their relationship, and discuss cars. | Full Stop
• A delicate and melancholy thing expressed in manic synth pop: Mary Gaitskill on costuming, lostness, and “Nowhere Girl” by B Movie. | Catapult
• Dark exuberance, transfigured reality, and marvelous riffs on buttocks: on Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s debut novel, Tram 83. | NPR
• Poetry Day has provided us with Stephen Hawking reading Sarah Howe and Boromir reading Dylan Thomas, among other things. | National Poetry Day
• Freeing literature from the yoke of censorship: reading the books of Charles Rembar, legal defender of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill. | The Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Literary Hub: An oral history of Lit Crawls across America · Before the Booker Prize announcement next week, a letter from London · A brief survey of how professional readers read for pleasure · More than where they filmed The Wire, a literary long weekend in Baltimore · A people’s history of the American Public Library