LitHub Daily: September 21, 2015

TODAY: In 1945, Kay Ryan, the 16th Poet Laureate of the United States, is born. 

• On Jay DeFeo’s “captivation at the sight of the bone from a roast leg of lamb as it sat in her soup pot” and the power of repetition and multiplicity in art. | Literary Hub
• “There simply is no American history before black people.” An interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates from his “chosen exile” in Paris. | The Guardian
• Bombast, buzz, and bloated reception: a guide to the 2015 National Book Awards longlist. | Flavorwire
• Letters from Willie C. Williams, hopeless waltzer and only friend to Pound, to his mom. | The Paris Review
• Let the atrocious images haunt us: Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, and photography of the European refugee crisis. | JSTOR Daily
• On “simply surrendering to the elegant, limpid prose” of Lily Tuck’s very untraditional autobiography, The Double Life of Liliane. | The Millions
• Inscribing the black female body into the lyric: on Kiki Petrosino’s Hymn for the Black Terrific. | The Boston Review
• Orhan Pamuk has written his best book yet, post-Nobel Prize. | The Independent
• Reading Dorothy Iannone, our guide to a “place where patriarchy is nothing more than a distraction.” | The Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Literary Hub: Chinelo Okparanta on faith, war, and homosexuality in Nigeria · An interview with Harvard Book Store, spelled “book store” (two words) since 1932 · “Liquid Glass,” a story from Percival Everett’s new collection, Half an Inch of Water

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