LitHub Daily: July 22, 2015

• Remembering the first reading James Salter ever gave. | Literary Hub
• On our lingering obsession with Joan Didion, a celebrity we have crafted from her own self-description. | The New Republic
• Magnus Mills on buying vinyl, macro vs. micro storytelling, and the unchanging systems of buses. | BOMB Magazine
• Examining the state of short American fiction and interrogating the notion of “experimental” through New American Stories. | Guernica
• Julian Barnes unpacks the global brand of Van Gogh by reading the artist’s letters. | London Review of Books
• On the rising prevalence, and prominence, of literary collaborations. | Hazlitt
• A real no-no: jumping into the pool that Hemingway’s wife built to spite him. | Oxford American
• Ada Limón, Kyle Dargan, and Quan Barry have officially passed into mid-career with their fourth poetry collections. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• The American Book Awards have been announced; winners include Marlon James, Laila Lalami, and Anne Waldman. | Before Columbus Foundation

Also on Literary Hub: We get the book-to-movie adaptations we deserve · A poem by Douglas Kearney · A memoir of a surfing life, Barbarian Days