Lit Hub Daily: August 27, 2020

• “You were a sweet and powerful man, walking through the fire of your time.” Nikky Finney writes a letter to John Lewis. | Lit Hub Politics
• Sarah M. Broom looks back at the devastation of New Orleans East, 15 years after Hurricane Katrina. | Lit Hub History
• When Muhammad Ali first met the Black Prince of Harlem—also known as Drew “Bundini” Brown, one of boxing’s great hype men. | Lit Hub Biography
• Poetry by Eduardo C. Corral and Noah Falck. | Lit Hub Poetry
• “In their broad incoherence, The Protocols sound a lot like the conspiracy theories inundating our discourse now—and the president’s speeches.” Daniel Torday on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 100 years later. | Lit Hub Politics
• The new seduction of an old literary crime classic: Eugen Bacon pays homage to Peter Temple’s Truth with criticism (and some interspersions of fiction). | Lit Hub Criticism
• Trump as Hiaasenian Florida Man, Beowulf for the social-media era, Parul Sehgal on Elena Ferrante’s new novel, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Five debut crime and mystery novels to check out this August. | CrimeReads
• “There is no industry standard for which books get fact checked . . . There is no industry standard for what it means for a book to be ‘fact checked.’ There is no industry standard for where the fact check should go in the production process of a book.” Emma Copely Eisenberg on the lack of standard fact-checking in nonfiction and why we all should care. | Esquire
• How Chekhov invented the modern short story. | New Statesman
• “It felt uncomfortable not doing anything to stop the president while he destroyed America. But as a senior White House official with family money and other job opportunities, my hands were tied.” Behold: a probably far-too-accurate theoretical query letter from a former Trump staffer. | McSweeney’s
• Nobel-prize winning Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich called on Russia to help persuade President Alexander Lukashenko to negotiate. | Yahoo News
• “I’m not equipped nor interested in teaching anybody how to be anti-racist.” Brit Bennett on adapting her own work, Zoom fatigue, and storytelling. | Glamour
• In response to John Freeman’s call for a revitalized canon of California literature, readers responded with suggestions of books to include. | Alta
• 2020 will be remembered for a lot of disasters, but some good things too, like the surge of Black women who have topped bestseller lists. | Elle

Also on Lit Hub: On the brink of war: A view of North and South Korea in 1950 • An illustrator brings realism into Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction • Read an excerpt from Susan Abulhawa’s new novel Against the Loveless World.