Lit Hub Daily: August 13, 2019

• “Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge… include and exclude.” Ibram X. Kendi on the arbitrary hierarchies upon which racism is built. | Lit Hub
• Do we care enough about animals to save them from extinction? Jane Rawson on empathy deficit and the work of contemporary fiction. | Lit Hub
• From Alexander Jessup to Anna March, the Summer of (literary) Scam has been going on forever. | Lit Hub
• “Someday someone is going to take on the project of a full length Oliver Sacks biography, and it’s going to be extraordinary.” Lawrence Weschler remembers his dear friend. | Lit Hub
• “When the wind is in the east / ’tis good for neither man nor beast.” A brief history of the wind makes us crazy. | Lit Hub
• “I must suffer from imagination deficiency. I need pictures, other people’s words, to help me out, to get me on my way.” Hai-Dang Phan on poetic distance and reenacting the past. | Lit Hub
• David Carlin on absent fathers, missing histories, and the intoxicating other worlds of the encyclopedia. | Lit Hub
• In the Country of Women author Susan Straight recommends five great memoirs about mixed-race families, from Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime to Luís Alberto Urrea’s Nobody’s Son. | Book Marks
• Absalmon! Absalmon!: William Faulkner’s 1952 review of The Old Man and the Sea. | Book Marks
• David Handler on the life and work of Geoffrey Homes, the godfather of film noir. | CrimeReads
• “It was this recuperative alchemy that defined soul, as a music and an ethos”: How the music of the “High Priestess” of soul, Nina Simone, shaped Toni Morrison’s approach to fiction. | The New Yorker
• From Circe to Baba Yaga (and many, many more)—the witch in literature has made a stunning resurgence. Why now? | The Guardian
• Bridget Jones and Thomas Cromwell feature on this list of the 25 most important characters of the past 25 years (along with Pikachu, The Rock, and Milkshake Duck). | Slate
• “Later I will meet a girl who I’ll want like I want Barbie.” Kristen Arnett on being queer and loving Barbies. | BuzzFeed News
• Sorry, Holden: The Catcher in the Rye—along with Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction—will finally be released as an e-book. | The New York Times
• “Like twin moons, wife and marmoset closely orbit their beloved Leonard, Virginia often provoking Mitz to little fits of jealousy.” On Sigrid Nunez, Virginia Woolf, and the literary marmoset. | The Paris Review
• The New York Public Library’s two stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, are getting a ($250,000) bath—with lasers. | Gothamist

Also on Lit Hub: A literature of belonging: stories of real America • Sarah M. Broom, Peter Orner, and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire • Read from Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones).