LitHub Daily: September 27, 2016

• On solitude, compromise, and publishing that first novel: Merritt Tierce in conversation with Anuk Arudpragasam. | Literary Hub
• Mark Greif is not actually against everything: on Thoreau, the presidential race, and the search for yes. | Literary Hub
• On the heterodox jewishness of Clarice Lispector. | Literary Hub
• How long until a robot wins a Pulitzer? | Literary Hub
• The Grumpy Librarian: recommendations weird, bleak, hilarious, and gritty. | Literary Hub
• On a new biography of Shirley Jackson and the contradictory roles she occupied: “wife or author, popular genre writer or highbrow novelist, mother or witch.” | The New Republic
• “I’ve always been interested in how the macrocosm and the microcosm relate and how they connect with each other.” An interview with Vijay Seshadri. | Divedapper
• All crime novels are social novels: On the genre-transgressing work of Tana French. | The New Yorker
• Nicholas Wong on speaking with the body, the need for subversion, and the interaction of the personal and social aspects of poetry. | Asymptote
• It’s a reciprocal, participatory literature: On literary advice columns and the writing of Kristen Dombek, Heather Havrilesky, and Sheila Heti. | The Point
• “I realized that perhaps I was in a good position to help introduce my fellow Anglophone readers to the exciting fiction coming out of China.” An interview with Ken Liu, translator of The Three-Body Problem. | The National Book Review
• On the “paradox of the blank book,” wherein “pristine pages cast doubt upon the merit of our words.” | Catapult
• A “new resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people” has launched with a piece by Eileen Myles on social media. | The Creative Independent

Also on Literary Hub: If Bruce Springsteen wrote a short story collection: presenting the New York Times-bestselling Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back · Books making news this week: biographies, bohemians, and Bruce · You have to master yourself: from Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata