LitHub Daily: September 9, 2015

TODAY: In 1828, Leo Tolstoy is born; here he is reading a draft his work to a circle of Tolstoyans. 

• John Keene in conversation with Tanya Foster, on the “ontology of grief,” the day Harlem went quiet, and how not speaking can be incredibly powerful. | Literary Hub
• “I’m nothing if not persistent,” asserts the white guy who submitted his poem, later selected for The Best American Poetry 2015, under the name Yi-Fen Chou after it was rejected 40 times. | BuzzFeed News
• Ghost ships and the need for blood: two short stories by Joy Williams. | The Offing, The New Yorker
• Patrick deWitt on the off-putting nature of audiences, the quality storytelling of fairy tales, and the letdowns of being human. | VICE
• Between Christian Grey and Jane Eyre, we have the sex writing of Lydia Davis. | The Critical Flame
• Margo Jefferson on shifting pronouns, entering into worlds made from words, and subway reactions to the title Negroland. | Electric Literature
• “For sixty years it’s been a sealed labyrinth where we keep arriving at the same dead ends, theme, and mediocre variations.” Interrogating Herzog and the masculine literary corpus. | Bookslut
• Authors on the personal impact and semiotics of the refugee crisis. | Granta, The New Inquiry
• There’s always a silver lining, we guess: the “awkward” conversation between Roxane Gay and Erica Jong reveals just how far feminism has come. | The Guardian, Flavorwire

Also on Literary Hub: Beyond Borges, a list of Argentine writers you should know · A new poem by Hoa Nguyen · This wasn’t invented: an excerpt from Clancy Martin’s Bad Sex

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