LitHub Daily: September 23, 2015

TODAY: In 1909, Phantom of the Opera is first published as a serialization in Le Gaulois. 

• Margaret Atwood gives the Genius annotation treatment to an excerpt from her forthcoming novel, The Heart Goes Last. | Literary Hub
• Literary Hub launches a podcast, A Phone Call From Paul. Episode one, Paul Holdengraber calls Neil Gaiman on the telephone. | Literary Hub
• There will be no future opportunities to Oyster and chill: the “Netflix of books” is shutting down, and much of the team is moving to Google Play Books. | Oyster, Re/code
• In superhero news that won’t immediately cause you to feel an overwhelming sense of fatigue, Ta-Nehisi Coates will be writing a new Black Panther series. | The New York Times
  
• From the original eggsplainer to the (aforementioned) Genius, an annotated history of annotations. | The New Republic
• Kit Williams’s The Hare offered a textual treasure hunt with a real-life prize, causing readers to conjure wildly invented, false meanings in ways that hadn’t been seen again until Game of Thrones. | Hazlitt
• “You can’t feed mostly upon yourself and sustain enough energy to live.” Juliet Jacques on the anxieties of writing, looking back at the past, and anti-climatic ends. | The New Inquiry
• An analysis of the two books of the summer, a failed “nostalgia-reinforcing simulacrum” and a “tiny poop emoji matryoshka-doll nested within two larger ones.” | The Gawker Review of Books
• “Reading fiction is in some sense… pitting your desires against the implacable will of the book.” Chris Bachelder on serialization, tonal complexity, and precise articulation. | Full Stop
• In the criminal justice system, we consider passive voice-related offences to be especially heinous: potential scenes from Grammar Police. | The Millions

Also on Literary Hub: A graphic interpretation of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” by Zanna Goldhawk · On the literary stage: when rock festivals get bookish · Six poems by Kay Ryan · An object lesson from Ariana Kelly on telephones

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