Lit Hub Daily: February 19, 2021

• Interview with an Indie Press: Milkweed staffers talk reader relationships, working together during political turmoil, and what having a mega-hit (Braiding Sweetgrass!) meant for the company. | Lit Hub
• “Gay identity may be a kind of speech act—and a gay bar not just saloon, but salon.” Jeremy Atherton Lin on the literary history of gay and lesbian bars. | Lit Hub History
• Bethanne Patrick recommends five books you might’ve missed in January, featuring Wandeka Gayle and Alina Bronsky. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “The movement that began by addressing ‘a problem that has no name’ had become a movement that named with impunity.” Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore on the writings that launched the women’s liberation movement. | Lit Hub History
• Janet Skeslien Charles on researching Dorothy Reeder, the Directress of the American Library in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France, who defied the Bibliotheksschütz’s authority. | Lit Hub History
• Will Self reflects on the literary canon, which was never “the overbearing and fortified phenomenon its detractors love to hate and besiege.” | Lit Hub
• Elle Cosimano introduces a new generation of crime writers who started in YA. | CrimeReads
• New titles from Patricia Lockwood, Roberto Bolaño, and Bill Gates all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• From Bún bò Huế to KFC: what it was like to eat with Anothony Bourdain. | Food and Wine
• How Onyinye Miriam Uwolloh’s “Ishmael Na My Name” updates—and challenges—Melville’s original text. | Words Without Borders
• Reading this year’s NBCC Award finalists: Megan Labrise on francine j. harris’s Here Is the Sweet Hand. | Lit Hub
• “The dirty secret is the pleasure people take in living in the shadow of punishment.” Hari Kunzru on the breathtaking violence of the American criminal justice system, and the possibility of reform. | Harper’s
• “Their psychosis was, importantly, only theirs to turn into art.” On Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn, and refusing musehood. | The Baffler
• “What is interesting, for me, is just how long trauma can linger and how sometimes when you least expect it you have these reminders.” Roxane Gay discusses how to write about trauma and handle criticism. | Vanity Fair
• “When my mind went there, I hummed, loud and insistent, a melody like angry telephone hold music.” Ruth Madievsky on addressing assault in writing. | Guernica
• On finding kinship with Octavia Butler’s Lauren Oya Olamina. | NPR

Also on Lit Hub: Michelle D. Commander unearths the lives of her formerly enslaved ancestors • Kathryn Nuernberger on the very rare case of a male witch’s execution • Read from Lucie Elvin’s debut novel, The Weak Spot