Lit Hub Daily: July 24, 2019

• “I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told that as a brown person I’m the lucky beneficiary of positive discrimination.” Monica Ali on one of the most insidious myths of the book world. | Lit Hub
• Howard Norman on his 42-year correspondence with W.S. Merwin, and the accumulated meaning of 416 letters. | Lit Hub
• July’s best book covers pair well with a swimsuit. | Lit Hub
• “Access to something as basic as books is so tenuous, so easily ripped away.” On the underground group supplying incarcerated people in Pittsburgh with books. | Lit Hub
• “Birds are sent from ships to shore; canaries are lowered into mines; falcons are loosed to find prey…” Love, death, and the birds of Terry Tempest Williams. | Lit Hub
• The Booker Prizes released the longlist for this year’s award. | The Hub
• “To write about water you have to follow it. And to follow it, you have to get on it”: Porter Fox recommends 3 books about how water is changing our world. | Book Marks
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Nora Caplan-Bricker on Ursula K. Le Guin, Elizabeth Hardwick, and mixed reviews. | Book Marks
• Daniel Nieh recommends all the international crime fiction a globetrotter could need, from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American to John Burdett’s Bangkok 8. | CrimeReads
• The Booker Prizes released the longlist for this year’s award. | The Hub
• German author Brigitte Kronauer has died at 78. Kronauer, most of whose writings have not been translated into English, received the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize in 2005. | PM News Nigeria
• “What does it mean to say, She is white? I am white? That is a white person?” Jess Row curates a reading list on whiteness. | Bookforum
• 100 books to inspire any teenager’s (ambitious) summer reading—or, the list Dan Kois gave his daughter this year. | Slate
• Relatable: how a YA author got her start writing Pride and Prejudice fanfiction . . . about Neopets. | VICE
• As part of the League of Arab States’ effort to aid the revival of the University of Mosul in Iraq, Morocco’s Ministry of Culture and Communication donated hundreds of books to the school. | Morocco World News
• The unlikely history of the literary publisher Faber & Faber includes (among other venerable players) Lord of the Flies and Andrew Lloyd Webber. | The New Yorker
• “The main challenge has been to come up with something more ludicrous than reality.” Quercus will publish a spoof diary of a teenage Boris Johnson. | The Bookseller

Also on Lit Hub: On the hypercapitalist utopian project of Singapore • The unsung woman who changed how we take care of newborns • Read from Regina Porter’s debut novel The Travelers.