Lit Hub Daily: August 5, 2021

• Mona Awad’s question for any writer on the precipice of giving up, plus more advice from the author of All’s Well. | Lit Hub Craft

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• Rachel Kushner in praise of the Gun Club’s Mother Juno and the richness of Mexican-American punk rock. | Lit Hub Music

• “No one wants to appear weak or disturb the balance we all must negotiate in order to be fully present, to do the job we were trained to do.” Robert Meyer reflects on life as an emergency doctor during COVID-19. | Lit Hub Health

• Deborah Copaken considers the “ironic and often fatal prison” of tying health insurance to full-time employment—especially for new mothers. | Lit Hub

• How Annie McDermott (coincidentally) mirrored the life of Mario Levrero as she translated his “beguiling, preposterous, uncategorizable book,” The Luminous Novel. | Lit Hub Translation

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• Amy Belding Brown visits the houses of Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, and more. | Lit Hub

• Patricia Lockwood on bear sex, James Lasdun on the latest Stephen King, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Timothy Schaffert with a brief history of perfume thieves. | CrimeReads

• Edward J. Watts talks about the fall of Rome and the dangerous rhetoric of decline. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

• “Is it a metaphor for our relationship to nature? Fuck off.” Patricia Lockwood on Marian Engle’s Bear. | London Review of Books

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• A reading list to commemorate Women in Translation Month. | CLMP

• “I want plots for friendship that involve friends daring all for each other, choosing each other, sacrificing for each other, living alongside and with each other.” B.D. McClay rethinks the friendship plot. | Lapham’s Quarterly

• James Hill Tate talks about his new memoir, blindness, and his novel in-progress. | BookPage

• “I wanted to explore the whole idea of who gets hurt, what are the known repercussions that could come out even generations later, and how that impacts the entire family.” Tracey Lange on families and secrets. | EW

• “The life of a writer isn’t something that capitalism funds. Capitalism, as an incredibly inhumane system, is hostile to art making.” Kate Zambreno on the economics of a literary life. | Observer

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• Veronica Esposito asks Laurence Jackson Hyman, the oldest child of Shirley Jackson, about producing a volume of his mother’s letters. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: The author of Her Turn considers thought-provoking infidelity narratives • On the power of social influence and the dangers of the bandwagon effect • Read a story from Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s latest collection, Songs for the Flames