Lit List: January 13, 2017

Good evening readers. Here's your round-up of today's must-read literary news, commentary and fiction.

Ottessa Moshfegh. Source: Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0

• Ottessa Moshfegh's writing dwells on inner and outer ugliness Bookforum 
• How Elena Ferrante's Frantumaglia unites "two cultures in women’s writing that are not supposed to mix" Dissent 
• Let yourself be consumed by this fascinating history of human and animal cannibalism Slate
• The novel of the Obama era: chasing authenticity, haunted by "the specter of phoniness" and the myth of meritocracy New York Magazine 
• Matías Celedón's The Subsidiary is the tale of an ordinary office where a power outage goes terribly wrong, written entirely in office stamps 3% 
• How a poet on a desolate island fell in love with a statue Guernica
• In Teddy Wayne's Loner, a male Harvard student transforms "from part-time creep to full-blown psychopath" The Los Angeles Review of Books