LitHub Daily: September 8, 2016

TODAY: In 1966, the first UNESCO International Literacy Day is celebrated. 

• Kia Wilson on how being a bookseller made her a better writer. | Literary Hub
• How individualism conquered American fiction: Jonathon Sturgeon on the “imperial self” and the rejection of social responsibility. | Literary Hub
• Lauren Collins really didn’t want to write a memoir: Stephanie LaCava talks to the author of When in French: Love in a Second Language. | Literary Hub
• When news of a suicide comes during memoir class: practicing compassion in a room where difficult things are shared. | Literary Hub
• Emily Books asks… what is women’s writing? Emily Gould and Ruth Curry on their upcoming symposium. | Literary Hub
• In which Marlon James shares six things he learned about Brad Pitt, a regular guy/plant murderer. | T Magazine
• I’d Die for You, a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s complete unpublished stories, will be released next spring. | The Guardian
• “I wanted the book to be kind of smelly and loud and true.” A profile of Jonathan Safran Foer. | GQ
• On Adrienne Rich, “the unofficial poet laureate of 20th-century American feminism.” | The American Scholar
• “So much of what drives my work is the tension between fantasy and reality — and the fact that you can’t quite separate them, they start to fizzle together in the same pool.” An interview with Leopoldine Core. | Electric Literature
• Belle Boggs on “Italian novelist, essayist, playwright, short-story writer, translator, and political activist” Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues, the book on parenting that most profoundly impacted her. | The New Yorker
• “It’s getting to work, and saying it out loud, and reminding every person I meet on a bus and every Uber driver and every girlfriend who isn’t ‘a reader’ that they, too, will like these things that I work every day in support of.” An interview with National Book Foundation director Lisa Lucas. | The New York Times Magazine
• My lover looks at me like he looks at porn: A short story by Kait Heacock. | Joyland
• Issue two of Freeman’s Journal is launching in New York tonight, at the New School, featuring contributors Valeria Luiselli, Alexander Chee, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Garnette Cadogan, Roddy Roye, and Aminatta Forna. | McNally Jackson

Also on Literary Hub: Why you should hate football (but will watch it anyway): a reading list · How gun culture is sustained by high culture: 10 novels in which the symbolism of the gun is hard to ignore · The effects of cold on the human body: from Lynne Cox’s memoir, Swimming in the Sink

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