Lit Hub Daily: August 21, 2020

• How to write a millennial character: Emma Jane Unsworth wades in where lesser mortals dare not go. | Lit Hub
• A love letter to The Catcher in the Rye: Mary O’Connell on her favorite book and its conflicted legacy. | Lit Hub
• Thirteen ways of looking at flash fiction: Grant Faulkner on the infinite possibilities of brevity in a story. | Lit Hub
• “What of a heaven for pugs? What of clouds studded with soft sofas and TV sets and puffed daybeds?” Scott Cheshire on conceptions of an animal afterlife. | Lit Hub Religion
• Why have we failed to protect coal miners? Chris Hamby on one of America’s most dangerous jobs. | Lit Hub Politics
• “When I was a child, I thought Ray Bradbury lived in my grandmother’s basement.” Colleen Abel on growing up with Bradbury’s ghost in Waukegan, Illinois. | Lit Hub
• Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, and Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Sarah Vaughan on a recent trend of psychological thrillers exploring the ambiguities of parenting. | CrimeReads
• “If we are serving a whole country, then we need people within our publishing houses who reflect what our country looks like.” Lisa Lucas on the ongoing reckoning in publishing. | GEN
• One thing is certain about Eligio Gabriel García Márquez, the brother of Gabo. He did not want to be conflated with the elder Márquez’s accomplishments. | Pledge Times
• By not talking about the untimely, violent death of Theresa Hak Kyung, author of the 1982 novel Dictée, have critics overlooked an important part of her legacy? | The Nation
• “No one knows better than Stephens that the issues that threatened to destroy the Romance Writers of America go all the way back to its beginning.” On Vivian Stephens, a pioneer of romance publishing who has never gotten her due. | Texas Monthly
• In honor of Women in Translation Month, here are nine great translated books by Black women to pick up. | Words Without Borders
• What did democracy look like in the 19th century? Alicia Yin Cheng’s new book shows us the history of ballot design. | Hyperallergic
• At a time when browsing books indoors feels risky, people are turning to Little Free Libraries more than ever. | Los Angeles Times

Also on Lit Hub: Nick Ripatrazone speaks With Katie Scullion, director of high school writing program Polyphony Lit • Read an excerpt from Heidi Pitlor’s new novel Impersonation • Read an excerpt from Peter Geye’s new novel Northernmost.