Lit Hub Daily: August 20, 2020

• “The invisibility of Telephone’s conceit is a secret akin to craft.” David Lerner Schwartz on the tripartite puzzle that is Percival Everett’s Telephone. | Lit Hub Criticism
• The early American art of getting lost: On life in a nation of letter writers, claim jumpers, and Mark Twain. | Lit Hub History
• Sofian Merabet on safety and security as a particularly American preoccupation. | Lit Hub Politics
• The fandom of the teenage girl deserves more respect: Hannah Ewens explains why boy band mania is only partly about the boys. | Lit Hub Music
• “If you ever are unsure about a person, drag them to the tennis court of their choice.” Professional tennis player Andrea Petkovic on reading Philip Roth and discovering some hard truths. | Lit Hub Sports
• Caroline Leavitt explores how life’s shifting identities filter into the work of a novelist. | Lit Hub
• Parul Sehgal on Helen Macdonald, James Wood on Catherine Lacey, Christian Lorentzen on J. M. Coetzee, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• “These books, so reluctant to engage with change, agency, and suffering, turn instead to awareness, which they frame as atonement.” On Naoise Dolan, Sally Rooney and the self-awareness trap in literary fiction. | The New Yorker
• “What is resilience anyway but an unfair exchange of energy?” Jami Attenberg reconsiders “rising above.” | The New York Times
• “It’s a nature word for a color most often found in nature. A dreamy word for a color that exists at the edges of the night.” Katy Kelleher follows the history of periwinkle. | The Paris Review
• How authors releasing books during the pandemic have perfected the art of the Zoom book tour. | Washington Post
• Ocean Vuong, who will be the seventh author to contribute to the Future Library art project, talks about writing against the market and for the future (if you’re around in 2114, enjoy Vuong’s book!). | MSN
• Nearly half of Jones Hill Wood, the woodland that inspired Roald Dahl to write Fantastic Mr. Fox, will be destroyed to make room for a planned railway in the UK. | PoliticsHome
• What can we learn from early manuscripts of classic novels (besides that Percy Bysshe Shelley was a shameless margin-flirter)? | BBC

Also on Lit Hub: A Polish journalist finds the gatekeepers of Ellis Island • The ministry of suffering: A morning in Jerusalem • Read a story from Lina Wolff’s collection Many People Die Like You, trans. by Saskia Vogel.