Lit Hub Daily: July 17, 2020

• Kelli Jo Ford recommends books that helped her find a way home, from Love Medicine to Salvage the Bones. | Lit Hub
• “I grew up in a Christian house with a pagan underbelly, and found the two were not quite as oppositional as some may expect.” Martin Shaw on Celtic storytelling, from the bardic to the mythic. | Lit Hub
• Olivia Rutigliano makes the case for Jaws as a perfect summer—and endlessly symbolic—blockbuster. | Lit Hub
• How fiction can function as a lab for community ethics: Maren Tova Linett on the impact of literature on the way we value life. | Lit Hub
• “What does it mean for a writer or artist to inspire passionate devotion on both the political left and right?” Tobias Carroll on Springsteen, Houellebecq, and the complicated business of bridging ideologies. | Lit Hub
• Tahar Ben Jelloun on his political imprisonment in Morocco, and the danger of silence under dictatorship. | Lit Hub
• David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians, Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, and Leila Slimani’s Sex and Lies all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Christina Schwarz goes on the trail of Bonnie and Clyde, camera in hand. | CrimeReads
• Joanna Cole, author of The Magic School Bus series (and creator of the coolest field trips ever), has died at 75. | NPR
• Square. Wellington Square—This is the London locale where author William Boyd believes James Bond lived. Boyd scoured Ian Fleming’s novels for clues. | TLS
• Namwali Serpell on the great Sun Ra and his “jazzy, contrapuntal metaphysics of blackness.” | NYRB
• “I don’t want to romanticize the past, but I can let Hafez’s words guide me in my present.” On seeking solace in the work of a 13th century Persian poet. | Guernica
• Iceland—which publishes more books per capita than any other nation—has long weathered disaster with literature. | Wall Street Journal
• In Los Angeles, independent bookstores are having renewed conversations about race and inclusion. | Los Angeles Times
• An extensive internet archive of food history needs your help to keep going. | Atlas Obscura

Also on Lit Hub: Ikechukwu Ogbu on the Igbo art of storytelling • Inside a reporter’s notebook at the US-Mexico border • Read an excerpt from Colin Hester’s new novel Death and the Butterfly.