LitHub Daily: February 1, 2016

• What it means to reveal emotional truth in a historical novel: on the stories we tell to make sense of the past. | Literary Hub
• “Could I offer the world something so useful and beautiful?” Sarah Manguso confronts her writerly envy. | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• Leanne Shapton provides seven cultural highlights, from beautiful, poetic writing to the perfect underwear. | The Guardian
• The first indies of 2016: 41 books put out by small presses last month. | Entropy
• Poetic coffee sleeves, short story vending machines, and literary train tickets: On the guerilla tactics being implemented to promote reading. | The Atlantic
• In which Jenny Diski imagines writing a book of the words she has lost to aging and chemotherapy. | Berfrois
• Maya Angelou’s century-old Harlem brownstone, home to numerous bookshelves and a summer fruit-inspired living room, is for sale. | The New York Times
• When you take a stroll through the territory of children’s literature, you’d better know where the land mines are buried: On the racism present in many books for young readers. | The Daily Beast
• Nature is always in capital and capitalism is always in nature: On Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life. | The New Inquiry

Also on Literary Hub: Inside The Mysterious Bookshop, the largest and oldest mystery bookstore in the world · David Ulin on Sinclair Lewis, Donald Trump, and American know-nothing nativism · Translating the spin from a Trump-Free Debate · From Sharon Guskin’s The Forgetting Time