Lit Hub Daily: August 2, 2017

• When your therapist leaves for summer vacation: a patient’s August doldrums. | Literary Hub
• In the face of condescension and sexual harassment, finding solace in the words of furious women. | Literary Hub
• A reading list that will warp your sense of reality. | Literary Hub
• Secrets of the book designer: a look behind the animal-centric cover for Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State. | Literary Hub
• You, too, can master the art of flavor. | Literary Hub
• Sam Shepard on writing, reading, and the promise of eternal love, from his letters to Johnny Dark. | Literary Hub
• Beautiful, furious: On what would have been James Baldwin’s 93rd birthday, read a 1953 review of his debut novel Go Tell it On the Mountain. | Book Marks
• Megan Abbot on Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel In a Lonely Place, which “extends beyond form or genre and into cultural mythos: the birth of American noir.” | The Paris Review
• Grace Talusan has won the 2017 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for her novel The Body Papers. | Restless Books
• Sarah Manguso considers the first draft, “an anachronism from the time before laptops and word processing software.” | The New York Times
• Morgan Parker, sam sax, and Sally Wen Mao are among the finalists for the 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. | Poetry Foundation
• “The end of the world is universal shorthand for whatever we don’t want to happen.” An interview with William Gibson. | Vulture
• “We were friends; good or bad, we were just ourselves. The passing of time did nothing but strengthen that.” Patti Smith remembers Sam Shepard. | The New Yorker
• On the urgency of Ishmael Reed’s recently reissued novel Mumbo Jumbo, which reveals that “the world has changed very little” since its original publication in 1972. | The Guardian

And on Literary Hub: Becoming a writer means learning to negotiate. • Sarah Schulman on conflict, oppression, and restorative justice. • Read from Lauren Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language.