LitHub Daily: September 14, 2016

TODAY: In 1964, Vasily Grossman, Soviet Russian writer and journalist and author of Life and Fate, dies. 

• Affinity Konar in Poland, revisiting the hardest scenes from her novel. | Literary Hub
• Introducing: bookselling in the 21st century, a new series about the state of the independent bookstore. | Literary Hub
• Why I’m starting a publishing house in Romania. | Literary Hub
• Alan Moore goes (very very) big with Jerusalem: on the ongoing ascendancy of the very long novel. | Literary Hub
• The 2016 National Book Awards longlist for nonfiction has been announced, including Patricia Bell-Scott, Ibram X. Kendi, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. | The New Yorker
• “For headstrong women who know their own desires, growing up in conventional society sometimes feels like inhabiting a haunted house.” On the writing (and Ruth Franklin’s new biography) of Shirley Jackson. | The Atlantic
• “Herrera’s prose is beyond hard-boiled: it is baked dry by the unrelenting desert sun, then picked clean by vultures.” Aaron Bady on Yuri Herrera’s novels. | The Boston Review
• On Lionel Shriver’s highly questionable keynote address at the Brisbane Writers Festival defending cultural appropriation, delivered a sombrero. | The New York Times
• “Women readers want emotional depth at every level of the fiction market, whether they’re getting their book recommendations from People magazine or Instagram.” A report from the Emily Books symposium on “women’s writing.” | The Awl
• David Biespiel’s series on poems that shaped America launched with an examination of “The Idea of Ancestry” by Etheridge Knight. | The Rumpus
• Ideas are the driving connection between stories: On Alexandra Kleeman’s new collection, Intimations. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• On Donald Trump and freshmen writing: How the “Trumpian goal of winning has infected the American student essay.” | Guernica
• “There are so many white women speaking honestly and writing confessionally that just doing it no longer can be called revolutionary.” On Jennifer Weiner’s recent comments on the selection for Oprah’s Book Club. | The Huffington Post, Jezebel

Also on Literary Hub: One of the greatest English prose writers of all time? On Ruth Scurr’s unconventional biography of John Aubrey · Wrestling with writer’s block in the middle of a cranberry bog · A night sealed up in its night: from Between Life and Death by Yoram Kaniuk, translated by Barbara Harshav

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