LitHub Daily: October 15, 2015

• Gavin McCrea on mining the correspondence of Marx and Engels, and finding the heroine of his novel. | Literary Hub
• Roland Glasser (translator) has a few beers and a big dinner with Fiston Mwanza Mujila (writer) somewhere in the 18th arrondissement; translation ensues, and Tram 83, a “jazz novel,” comes to life in English. | Literary Hub
• Posing humanness as a question: craft, cynicism, and claims about language in Joy Williams’s short stories. | The Point
• On the sardonic gender performance of Eileen Myles, who writes “in the voice of the only girl in school who smokes cigarettes properly.” | Full Stop
• Searching for the story that matched the personal Jimmy to the public James: Reading James Baldwin’s letters to his brother. | The Boston Review
• Harriet the Spy + punk rock = this year’s (literally) biggest book: Kevin Nguyen talks with Garth Risk Hallberg. | BuzzFeed Books
• Before #FerranteFever, there was Byromania: On the history (and grave desecrations) of celebrity writers. | Lapham’s Quarterly
• Two new books delve into current state of affairs and the creation myth of magick in America, “a nation that has witch-crushing stones as part of its foundation.” | Bookforum
• Raised Catholic, but not non-Catholic: Chimamanda Adichie on Pope Francis and returning to Mass. | The Atlantic
• Ai Weiwei has turned “his own personal and political trials into high-impact art installations… blog posts and Instagram memes,” and now, a memoir. | The New York Times

Also on Literary Hub: Leon Wieseltier remembers editor and award-winning translator Carol Janeway · An interview with the writer-editor-illustrator-founder of #Readwomen, Joanna Walsh · An alternative to the blunt force trauma of an MFA, inside Univeristy of Arizona Poetry Center · A Spinglish-English translation of the Democratic debate · A retelling of Camus’s The Stranger by Michael Seidlinger, The Strangest