LitHub Daily: September 26, 2016

TODAY: In 1888, Englishman Thomas Stearns Eliot is born in America. 

• Roxane Gay in conversation with Rion Amilcar Scott: on representation, superheroes, and the failure of the market. | Literary Hub
• The secret to faking your own death: Elizabeth Greenwood on the middle-aged fantasy of pseudocide. | Literary Hub
• Lily King and Margot Livesy on loss, inspiration, and ambition. | Literary Hub
• In an important conversation (that will go on so long as two writers draw breath), Kaitlyn Greenidge has delivered a wonderful rejoinder to Lionel Shriver on the subject of who gets to write what. | The New York Times
• Margaret Atwood on rewriting her favorite (and “conveniently dead”) author, William Shakespeare. | The Guardian
• “We are in a state of emergency, and as American citizens, we should acknowledge it. Silence is a form of complicity.” An interview with Claudia Rankine. | BuzzFeed News
• Nicholson Baker offers advice for scholastic adventures, reflects on worksheets and surprise, and shares the inspiration behind his most recent book. | Hazlitt
• “Yearning is so all-powerful. It’s being young and just looking at the world like a dog but I think it is these cracks of light in all of us.” Eileen Myles on the Zen Street Retreat. | Hyperallergic
• “First of all, I dislike writing. I was never the editor who wanted to be a writer. Writing is hard.” A profile of Robert Gottlieb. | The New York Times
• There is something horribly fascinating about seeing the world through Humbert’s eyes: On Lolita and portraying sexual predators in fiction. | NPR
• “His fevered dreaming as a slave in a stolen kingdom has also been my dreaming, his twangling instruments my own strange music.” Safiya Sinclair on how The Tempest’s Caliban inspired her own writing. | Harriet
• On Bottom’s Dream, one of the (literally) biggest books of this season (13 pounds, to be exact). | The Wall Street Journal

Also on Literary Hub: Ten Dickensian character names deciphered: from Mr. Pumblechook to Mr. Pecksniff, the meaning behind the monikers · How Peyton Place comforted me as a closeted teenager: revisiting Grace Metalious’s notorious novel 60 years later · Manna from heaven: From Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder

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