LitHub Daily: May 17, 2016

• Enrique Vila-Matas on the ever-growing mythology of Alejandra Pizarnik. | Literary Hub
• David Foster Wallace’s new sentimentality and how the best commencement speech of all time was bad for literature. | Literary Hub
• How Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love saved me. | Literary Hub
• Janice P. Nimura on the mutability of history, and meeting the descendants of her subjects. | Literary Hub
• Han Kang’s “exquisite and disturbing” The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, has won the Man Booker International Prize. | BBC
• “The idea of ‘seeing it before it melts’ was dismal and self-cancelling: why not just wait for it to melt and cross itself off the list of travel destinations?” Jonathan Franzen on traveling to Antarctica. | The New Yorker
• Mary Gaitskill on girl-on-a-horse stories, dealing with criticism, and trusting her body while writing. | Guernica
• “I want (and wanted) to write short stories enough that it seemed worth doing despite how awful and difficult and uncomfortable it can be, figuring out how to make a short story work.” An interview with Kelly Link. | Masters Review
• Katherine Dunn’s work is so alive it bleeds: Molly Crabapple on the lasting impact of Geek Love. | VICE
• “I went on this kind of endless, crazy search because I really believed what Gould believed — or said he believed — which is that the stories of ordinary people really matter.” Jill Lepore on writing Joe Gould’s Teeth. | NPR
• Erik Larson on hubris, thin-slice history, and going through the encyclopedia looking for a murderer. | Signature Reads
• Everything in this book comes as a surprise and should come as a surprise: Siddhartha Mukherjee on his new book, The Gene: An Intimate History. | Shelfari

Also on Literary Hub: The rise of the Chinese hipster: on generation Wenqing, aka “Cultured Youth” · Books making news this week: mornings, musicians, and maternity · An affair: “Anniversary” a story by Jensen Beach