Lit Hub Daily: August 18, 2020

• Can dogs help us be better writers? Anna Bruno reflects on the “profound lessons in humanity” that dogs offer us. | Lit Hub
• Mrs. Bridge is a perfect novel—but how does it work? Emily Temple unpacks an American classic. | Lit Hub Criticism
• A letter from North Carolina: Randall Kenan on learning from ghosts of the Civil War. | Lit Hub Politics
• Lisa Hanawalt’s early, surreal comic art includes freeway accidents, various hats, and of course, horses. | Lit Hub Art
• “No one becomes a billionaire honestly.” Sarah Chayes on the criminal masterminds of the Gilded Age (who created the very American system we live under today). | Lit Hub History
• How politically radical women in 19th-century France were made into misogynistic caricatures: Jill Richards on the petroleuses of the Paris Commune.  | Lit Hub History
• “In my experience, grief throws you forward and trauma hurls you back.” Sammi LaBue on family stories and hidden histories. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Sick, Scandalous, Spectacular: the first reviews of Lolita. | Book Marks
• Johnny Shaw explores the “other” California crime fiction, with a look at great novels that aren’t set in Los Angeles or San Francisco. | CrimeReads
• On William McGonagall, “the worst famous poet in the English language.” | Lapham’s Quarterly
• “I was at Mount Sinai, one of the leading hospitals in the country, and I had just delivered a baby without a doctor or nurse present.” Naomi Jackson on giving birth in America as a Black woman. | Harper’s
• When two brothers saw their father hospitalized with COVID-19, they began an initiative to bring books to him and other isolated patients. | Associated Press
• Sarah Gerard thinks of love “as an orientation to the one or ones to whom you commit and devote yourself completely, with full vulnerability, transparency, and honesty.” | The Believer
• In case you’re not already convinced that the USPS is essential to our society, take it from the author of the 1985 post-apocalyptic novel The Postman. | EW
• Mercedes Barcha, the widow of Gabriel García Márquez, has died at 87. Márquez credited Barcha for providing crucial support throughout his writing career. | ABC
• Seventy-five years after George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published, Téa Obreht writes, we may want to heed the story’s lessons now more than ever. | TIME

Also on Lit Hub: “Ode to the Corpse Flower”: A poem by Benjamin Garcia • How far has America’s Christianized dystopia strayed from Christ? • Read an excerpt from Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s new novel The New American.