Lit Hub Daily: August 5, 2020

• POV shifts and moral dilemmas on Red Headed Stranger: Odie Lindsey on learning to write from Willie Nelson and one of the greatest albums of the 1970s. | Lit Hub Craft
• Kapka Kassabova visits the Black Madonna of Lake Ohrid, and her keeper. | Lit Hub Travel
• On episode two of the Mighty SONG Writers, jazz pianist Marcus Roberts talks musical influences and the blues form, and plays a song or two. | Lit Hub Music
• Climate crisis fiction, a novel-cum-captivity narrative, and more recommended August reading from Lit Hub staff and contributors. | Lit Hub
• “The closer I moved towards my subjects and their homelands, the more intimate the book became.” Morgan Jerkins on telling the story of her family. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Luke Harding on the murder of Sergei Skripal, the Russian defector who became a warning from Moscow to London. | Lit Hub Politics
• Nothing scares Congressional lobbyists like rats in a toilet bowl: From Ralph Nader, a fable of sloth and corruption. | Lit Hub Politics
• Olivia Rutigliano rounds up the 35 most iconic caper films—and ranks them. | CrimeReads
• Judy Blume’s Superfudge, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and more rapid-fire book recs from Shaun Hamill. | Book Marks
• “In America, he is the soft boy, an aesthete, thoughtful and gently manipulative. In England, he is the sad boy, poetic and lachrymose. He is the beta narcissist in clinical terms. He is the male Madame Bovary in literary ones.” Merve Emre on “the longing man.” | The Point
• “It costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.” On the struggle to democratize knowledge. | Current Affairs
• Ta-Nehisi Coates will guest-edit the September issue of Vanity Fair. | Vanity Fair
• In the absence of new TV and summer blockbusters, the publishing industry is filling the entertainment void. | The Week
• In the early 20th century, southern Black communities built thousands of schools to improve education and literacy. | JSTOR Daily
• “We need to learn how to have heroes without revering them, learning, instead, to cherish something else entirely.” Gabrielle Bellot on adoration and loss. | Forge
• “I’m drawn to the ecstasy of emptiness, of being emptied and exhausted and dissected and torn apart.” Raven Leilani on finding inspiration in Susan Choi’s My Education. | Vulture

Also on Lit Hub: We need to treat artists as workers, not decorations • “In This Phase In The 58th American Presidentiad
(United States)”: A poem by Joseph Lawrence • Read an excerpt from Yun Ko-eun’s novel The Disaster Tourist, trans. by Lizzie Buehler.