Lit Hub Daily: August 14, 2020

• “If fiction has the power to show us another individual’s private and interior uniqueness, then why not depict animals possessing such interiority?” Kathleen Rooney on some of her favorite non-human narrators. | Lit Hub Criticism
• The intentional visual chaos of Beyoncé and Jay-Z in the Louvre: Alexis Boylan on the imagery of  “Apeshit.” | Lit Hub Music
• “Black theater is one of America’s most powerful resources for thinking about our nation’s social problems.” Five perspectives on race and Shakespeare in 2020. | Lit Hub
• Can the essay still surprise us? Suzanne Conklin Akbari reconsiders a Eurocentric tradition. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “The Stone of Fear.” A poem by Julia Cimafiejeva, in solidarity with the Belarusian people. | Lit Hub Poetry
• Kate Reed Petty recommends seven thrillers about filmmakers and subversive art. | CrimeReads
• New titles from Margot Livesey, Diane Cook, Elisa Gabbert, and Kathleen Rooney all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Lucy Scholes on Kay Dick’s lost dystopian masterpiece, They, “a surreptitious late-career aberration, whose genesis is unclear.” | The Paris Review
• “Being a poet is inherently embarrassing, but writing love poems feels especially shameful.” Rachel Rabbit White and Nico Walker in conversation. | Interview
• From union erasure to the myth of love (of books) conquering all: Why organizing book industry workers is so hard. | Jacobin
• “These characters are smart enough to know they’re objects, fully cognizant of their ineffectuality.” Lynn Steger Strong on the passive female characters of contemporary fiction. | Los Angeles Times
• How Uighur poets are “bearing eloquent witness to the catastrophe in their homeland.” | NYRB
• “I feel like I’m a bridge between the legacy of the past and the legacy of the future.” Katrina Books, the owner of Austin’s Black Pearl Books, on Black-owned businesses and her recent sales boom. | Austin360
• “Racism makes it difficult to love yourself, and encourages people to make themselves into the image racism prefers.” Matthew Salesses on writing a novel that explores racism’s impact on identity. | Ploughshares

Also on Lit Hub: On Mary King Ward, 19th-century celebrity scientist • Lit Hub Recommends: A Burning, The Changeling, and Palm Springs • Read an excerpt from Makenna Goodman’s debut novel The Shame.