LitHub Daily: September 20, 2016

TODAY: In 1878, novelist, journalist, and political activist Upton Sinclair is born. Here he is wearing a white suit and black armband, picketing the Rockefeller Building in New York City. 

• Fear and loathing in New England: Lev Grossman looks back at his first novel. | Literary Hub
• Jeanette Winterson on Paris’s great bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. | Literary Hub
• Is “show don’t tell” a universal truth or a colonial relic? On the western preference for visual over oral storytelling. | Literary Hub
• Introducing a monthly advice column, Ask the Publicists. This month’s query: but what about my book? | Literary Hub
• Writing advice from Edward Albee: when one of the great playwrights of the 20th century visits your high school. | Literary Hub
• He would always look at the city with a stranger’s eyes: On Albert Camus’ Paris. | The Paris Review
• “What is vanity now, and does it equate with mere selfishness or indicate a more complex balance of rational belief and carnal experience?” Lucy Ives on our attempts, in vain, to reconcile death and images of life. | Triple Canopy
• He was always a bit of an odd fish, Zaka the Zulu: A short story by Petina Gappah. | The New Yorker
• Art monster, wife monster, party monster: Miranda Popkey on reading My Marriage and Black Wings Has My Angel as a newlywed. | Catapult
• “The contradictions in human character, like our flaws, are very good material for a fiction writer.” An interview with Christine Sneed. | The National Book Review
• Celebrate National Translation Month with new translations from the Hausa language, a short story by Daniel Saldaña París (translated by Christina MacSweeney), and much more. | National Translation Month
• Margaret Lazarus Dean on what draws her to the language of spaceflight, the pressure to fully observe, and the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. | The Ribbon
• I see my not-me on the news: Two poems by Fatimah Asghar. | The Lifted Brow

Also on Literary Hub: On the irresistible pull of tidal metaphors · Books making news: anecdotes, architects, and anti-social behavior · Life here for life: from Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians

---