Lit Hub Daily: August 10, 2022

• How the first very good boy in the White House, Laddie the Airedale terrier, started a presidential trend. | Lit Hub History

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• The history of anti-abortion law, from poison control statutes to Pope Pius IX’s dictum. | Lit Hub Politics

• “There’s a loneliness in being called the N-word, in being called zebra & darkie, in rooms with saints’ images on the walls.” Kiki Petrosino muses on race and where “brightness” begins. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Kayla Maiuri on trying to understand her mother through writing fiction, and when fiction and reality blur. | Lit Hub

• “A huge part of the sadness of being an immigrant is accepting the fact that you are leaving this place, and you will forever have to hold it in your memory, as a home.” An interview with Belinda Huijuan Tang. | Electric Lit

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• Emily Zarevich recounts the Roger Dodsworth hoax of 1826, which inspired Mary Shelley. | JSTOR Daily

• Margaret Sullivan discusses the most effective way to organize against book bans, starting at the local level. | The Washington Post

• Ten artists talk about the books that have impacted them in the past year. | Art in America

• “I’d loved the book when I first read it, and had recognized its quality. So why hadn’t I remembered it that way? And what made Bank’s fiction so good?” Cara Blue Adams considers Melissa Bank’s literary legacy. | Gawker

• Jonathan Russell Clark on the past and future of the “Mega Novel.” | Esquire 

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• “I like a whiff of somebody else’s vulnerability. That’s a form of communicating, right?” Rachel Kushner and Kevin Morby in conversation. | Interview

Also on Lit Hub: Kimberly Garza on being a writer from Texas • How do animals understand death? • Read from Emi Yagi’s newly translated novel, Diary of a Void (tr. David Boyd)