LitHub Daily: November 8, 2016

• Patti Smith on poetry vs. lyrics, and how to write a song. | Literary Hub
• Why don’t actually need to make the National Book Awards “great” again. | Literary Hub
• Election stressing you out? Maybe you a need a little literary ASMR… (Because who doesn’t want a “brain orgasm”?) | Literary Hub
• Teju Cole looks beyond politics to find a little beauty in the world. | Literary Hub
• Jane Jacobs can still teach us a thing or two about civil disobedience. | Literary Hub
• 10 lessons from 10 years of running a small press. | Literary Hub
• A story for each of our presidents from Amelia Gray, Rion Amilcar Scott, and 42 other writers. | Melville House Books
• Bushwick is its own character, and this book is one of its biographies: An interview with Jacqueline Woodson. | Poets & Writers
• PEN has released a report entitled Writing on the Wall, “the most comprehensive account to date of the disappearance of five Hong Kong booksellers in late 2015.” | PEN America
• From Don Quixote to The Neapolitan Novels, 26 very long books worth the commitment. | Vulture
• Christina MacSweeney, Radiohead fan, on translating A Zero Sum Game, Eduardo Rabasa’s debut novel. | Fiction Advocate
• “The republic is built on a destruction of language. A kind of obliteration of language that will enable and excuse violence against bodies. My job is to interrogate and agitate that as often as I can.” A profile of Solmaz Sharif. | Newsweek
• “The more I read and listened, the more I could hear it as a simple and sensible response to what Sun Ra was feeling as a black guy in this incredibly segregated city where he had aspirations to do great things but couldn’t.” An interview with Paul Youngquist, the author of A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism. | VICE

Also on Literary Hub: Aminatta Forna visits the Museum of Broken Relationships · Five Books Making News: Zadie, Elena, and Eleanor! ·  Read from Fanny Howe’s latest meditation, The Needle’s Eye ·