LitHub Daily: October 26, 2015

• How will an African superhero handle race in America? On Ta-Nehisi Coates and the new Black Panther. | Literary Hub
• Junot Díaz has been declared unpatriotic and stripped of his order of merit award for advocating on behalf of persecuted immigrants in the Dominican Republic. | The Guardian
• Drag her, Queen: a very harshly annotated biography of Queen Victoria is going up for auction. | The New York Times
• “I’ve always thought of myself as a scholar who, at a certain point, began to write novels on the weekend… in the summer.” An interview with Umberto Eco. | Publishers Weekly
• A new biography of Charlotte Brontë strips away much of the glamour and dramatics, although both are certainly present in the meetings of the Brontë Society. | The Spectator
• “It is perhaps even truer of our society than of most that religion and public life are inextricably involved.” An excerpt from Marilynne Robinson’s forthcoming essay collection. | Financial Times
• Rachel B. Glaser on embracing weird feelings, honing metaphors, and the intoxication of ideas. | Hazlitt
• A history of Japanese literature is a history of ghost stories: on yūrei and storytelling traditions. | Electric Literature
• The newest “widely-practiced, if somewhat less-than-honest, trend with clear payoffs” in politics: bulk buying copies of a candidate’s own memoir. | The Christian Science Monitor

Also on Literary Hub: Talking to The King’s English in Salt Lake City, home of “the book lady” · “I am a white writer who used a Latino pen name.” Coming out as an appropriater · A poem-a-day countdown to the Irish Arts Center Poetry Fest: day five, Wendy Xu · Franco Nasi shares the Translator’s Blues