LitHub Daily: June 13, 2016

• When your research starts to terrify you: Flynn Berry on the perils of writing about murder. | Literary Hub
• Alana Massey on how she learned to stop worrying and empty her book shelves. | Literary Hub
• A pilgrimage to the $7,500 Muhammad Ali book. | Literary Hub
• “Homophobia, transphobia, and ideologically-nurtured hatreds of all kinds, coupled with semi-automatic weapons, provide the fuel for terror, in this case literally.” John Keene, Dawn Martin Lundy, and others respond to the mass shooting in Orlando. | Lambda Literary
• “I think in a very realistic, modern way, a three-dimensional way, and my role as a writer is to create language… This is what the challenge is for me: language… the word, the sentence, the paragraph.” Don DeLillo on Underworld. | The Guardian
• We are all too dumb for Helen DeWitt: How The Last Samurai cultivates ambition in its readers. | The Paris Review
• In which Stephanie Danler discusses the symbiotic relationship between her love for food and writing, explains why she wrote a novel instead of a memoir, and admits to having drunk Yellow Tail. | The New York Times
• This really happened, even if it didn’t: Lee Maracle on lies, mythology, and fiction. | Hazlitt
• Hamilton vs. Burr, library edition: Looking through the New York Society Library records to determine “all the books that Burr and Hamilton borrowed (and, mostly, returned).” | The New Yorker
• Daniel Saldaña París lists 10 essential Spanish-language books, including works by César Aira, Sergio Pitol, and Enrique Vila-Matas. | Publishers Weekly
• The lead actresses for the film adaptation of Zadie Smith’s NW have been announced. | Deadline

Also on Literary Hub: Bethanne Patrick recommends five beach reads for June, wherever you are · The genius behind the genius of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe: on Max Perkins, one of America’s greatest editors · Goodbye, Chicago: from Elisha Cooper’s Falling: A Daughter, A Father, and a Journey Back