LitHub Daily: September 29, 2015

TODAY: In 1967, Carson McCullers, who at the age of 19 published her first short story, “Wunderkind,” in Story magazine, dies. 

• What happens when social progress moves faster than your novel-in-progress. | Literary Hub
• Jonathan Russell Clark got really stoned and interviewed Jesse Eisenberg. | Literary Hub

• John Freeman on strategies for finding new writers that do not involve the occult arts. | Electric Literature
• Jonathan Franzen reviews a book about technology’s impact on human interaction; you will not believe how he feels. (Hint: “Our rapturous submission to digital technology has led to an atrophying of human capacities like empathy and self-­reflection.”) | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• Garth Risk Hallberg discusses the highly anticipated City on Fire, which we are destined to “either love, hate, or pretend to have read.” | Vogue
• “When I got very stoned and watched Planet Earth, I thought a lot about sand.” Claire Vaye Watkins on the origin of her debut novel, interrogating the myth of the American West, and the comfort of apocalyptic thinking. | Vol 1. Brooklyn
• On Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptual poetry and “challenging behavior,” which is a very delicate way of putting that. | The New Yorker
• Embodying the constant blows of the patriarchy: On Elena Ferrante’s preoccupation with the physicality of female bodies. | The New Republic
• A series of “thought-provoking missive[s] re: Lispector’s short stories:” a collaborative critical look at The Complete Stories. | Full Stop
• On the cynical indifference of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, perhaps “enough to turn even James Joyce political.” | The Lifted Brow

Also on Literary Hub: Living in fear of the Rapture, doing too many drugs, thinking the fear’s come true · Five books making news this week: ping-pong losers, political poets, and prize winners · Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth in ten quotes · A graphic novel about the search for a charismatic revolutionary named Fidel Castro

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