Lit Hub Daily: February 9, 2021

• “I went to bed in a room like a spider web, surrounded by bits of chapters dangling over me and around me.” How Rebecca Sacks tracks multiple character perspectives. | Lit Hub Craft
• Lucie Elvin tours French pharmacies and reflects on the boundaries of care during COVID-19. | Lit Hub
• This month’s 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers features Te-Ping Chen, Catie Disabato, Tod Goldberg, Brandon Hobson, and Russell Shorto. | Lit Hub
• “The only way we’ll see a significant shift in the industry is by having our own large, billion-dollar unicorn companies that are Black-owned or women-run or Latinx-run.” LaTeesha Thomas talks to Chad Sanders about working in the tech industry as a Black woman. | Lit Hub Tech
• Vendela Vida talks 1980s San Francisco, reliving those teenage feelings, and getting the permission she needed to be funny. | Lit Hub
• “People often ask me how many miles I have travelled. I do not know—or care.” From the never-before-published memoirs of “female vagabond” Kathleen Newton Phelan. | Lit Hub Travel
• Peter Vronsky on the Great Depression, WWII, and the birth of the modern serial killer. | CrimeReads
• Searing, sobering, and cynical: a look back at the first reviews of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. | Book Marks
• “Not all art that emerges from injustice wants to transcribe it; art can glance obliquely, using stolen sewing pins and tea-bag curtains to suggest longing and determination.” Leslie Jamison on the “breathtaking ingenuity” of incarcerated artists. | The Atlantic
• How The Brownies’ Book and the Defender Junior decentered whiteness and offered a radical vision of Black childhood. | The Conversation
• John J. Lennon entreats colleges to invest in incarcerated students. | The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Snap judgments: Lisa Kusel ponders the importance and impact of the author photo. | Brevity
• In praise of a “one-two punch of dynamite absurdity”: Kristen Arnett revisits her favorite line from The Office. | The Cut
• Inside Paramount Pictures’ fight with the Truman Capote Literary Trust to remake Breakfast at Tiffany’s. | Hollywood Reporter
• A complete set of the first editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels could be yours—for a mere $600,000. | Mental Floss

Also on Lit Hub: Joyce Carol Oates wants you to write your heart out • A brief history of metaphor in Persian poetry • Read from Vendela Vida’s new novel, We Run the Tides