Lit Hub Daily: August 13, 2020

• The most iconic short stories in the English language, as determined by that “weird and wiggly” hive-mind, the American cultural consciousness. | Lit Hub
• Jill Filipovic on how Boomers—“the generation with the least stable marriages in American history”—changed family life forever. | Lit Hub History
• “Appalachia is insanely complex, and its destruction has been muddy and tangled.” Leah Hampton on dead trees, JD Vance, and the problem of invasive species. | Lit Hub Politics
• Tom Philpott looks at the future of farming in a world of water shortages. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• Joan Didion, Angelyne, and the open road: How the Corvette helped create Southern California cool. | Lit Hub History
• “Sarraute always insisted that the tropism itself is an ungendered phenomenon, and that the writing through which she pursued it was equally ungendered.” On Nathalie Sarraute’s earliest writings. | Lit Hub
• Poet Will Harris talks to Peter Mishler about the idea of poetry as interconnectedness. | Lit Hub Poetry
• Josephine Livingstone on Raven Leilani, Alexandra Kleeman on Elisa Gabbert, Marcel Theroux on John Boyne, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Nina Sadowsky on how writing about psychopaths keeps her sane. | CrimeReads
• Twenty-four historic works by women—including Middlemarch—will be published under their authors’ real names for the first time. | The Guardian
• Alexandra Kleeman on making cultured butter as a “counterpoint to the intractability of the moment.” | New York Times Magazine
• Amazon Music will begin streaming podcasts… but only podcasts that don’t say anything negative about Amazon. | Pitchfork
• “I just decided that if she was going to get mentioned then I was going to be the one to tell her story, and to put the important role she played in my making in its proper context.” Natasha Trethewey on writing about her mother. | The New Yorker
• The neighbors of an upcoming bookstore in Virginia claim that the owner is taking books to sell from Little Free Libraries. | Washingtonian
• “I’m not an educator. I’m just telling a story about these people and their choices, so it’s strange to be swept up in this discourse.” Brit Bennett on euphemism, transgression, and accidentally writing a topical novel. | Los Angeles Times
• On the demise of second-hand bookshops in the UK. | The Critic

Also on Lit Hub: Kristen Savali West on motherhood and parenting with ancestral resilience • The unfolding geological language of Taipei • Read an excerpt from Jennifer Hofmann’s novel The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures.