Lit Hub Daily: August 6, 2021

• “It’s as if Smith knew what was coming and wanted us to have good company.” Sara Batkie on reading Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet during the past year of COVID-19. | Lit Hub Year in Reading

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• Lucy Jones enumerates the science-based health benefits of enjoying a post-gardening high (or just playing in the dirt). | Lit Hub Science

• Indie booksellers recommend their favorite new releases from independent presses this August. | Lit Hub

• “Twenty-six years later, this place feels more like a dream I’d concocted to soothe myself than a homeland.” Anna Qu returns to China in search of a past she never knew. | Lit Hub Memoir

• A new kind of ride-share: Marcello Di Cintio talks to the women behind Ikwe, a collective founded in response to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. | Lit Hub

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• Allison Larkin recommends seven music-focused novels to commune with this summer. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Joe Keohane on the case for talking to strangers. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

• Louise Candlish with a list of mysteries set on trains, boats, and other moving vehicles. | CrimeReads

• “Writing didn’t serve the purpose I wanted it to, which was to fix the fundamentally broken relationship between myself and other people.” Kristen Roupenian on the author, the work, and the public. | The New Yorker

• Listen to this podcast with John Darnielle and Maggie Smith, who talk about their recent collaboration and more. | TalkHouse

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• Bryan Washington shares a new short story about a private chef who spends lockdown cooking for wealthy Houstanites. | The Cut

• “The experience made me think more seriously, and gratefully, about hospitality as not just a personal virtue but a political one, maybe even the ultimate political one.” Tara Isabella Burton considers the nature of hospitality. | The Line of Beauty

• Brandon Taylor considers the contemporary novel’s “crisis of morality.” | Sweater Weather

• A look back at the fashion illustrations and erotic portraits of early 20th-century artist Gerda Wegener. | Hyperallergic

• “As a child, I lived within the boundaries my mother built, both safe and sick.” Alice Hattrick explores their relationship with their mother and chronic illness. | Granta

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Also on Lit Hub: Darrel J. McLeod on returning to his Indigenous heritage as a teacher • A poem by Logen Cure, from Welcome to Midland • Read from Bethan Roberts’ newly reissued novel, My Policeman