Lit Hub Daily: August 14, 2023

• Barbie fashion designer Carol Spencer on finding her way to Mattel. | Lit Hub

• “When I arrived on the other side of money, I could not do the thing I had planned: to just make art and be happy.” Bette Adriaanse muses on the stories we tell about wealth, poverty, and inequality. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Lara Love Hardin considers how systemic barriers keep the formerly incarcerated from rebuilding their lives: “The system is cobbled together out of catch-22s.” | Lit Hub Politics

• 10 new crime novels coming out this week. | CrimeReads

• “Everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, enjoys a good story. And so it seems to me that the first rule of evangelical nature writing should be: Tell one.” Jonathan Franzen on birds, the Bible, and why nature writing needs to be about more than just nature. | The New Yorker

• Sonja Drimmer digs into the past and present of handwriting. | Public Books

• Expand your horizons with these “promisingly weird” books coming from university presses this fall. | Inside Higher Ed

• A conversation with Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon. | Poets.org

• Melissa Febos on the profound impact of Judy Blume. | NYRB

• “Given to me by a city reporter friend, this has become one of the books I recommend most for unlikely escapism.” Two escapist biographies recommended by Sadie Stein. | New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Who really invented the selfie? • Jennifer C. Nash on losing time with dementia • Read from Guadalupe Nettel’s newly translated novel, Still Born (tr. Rosalind Harvey)