Lit Hub Daily: July 28, 2020

• When life returns to some semblance of normal, will we still write in cafés? Emily Temple on the end of an era. | Lit Hub
• Oscar Villalon’s letter from San Francisco: “What was he supposed to do? Where was the help that was promised, that was needed? His anger, his fright was palpable.” | Lit Hub
• Anne Trubek offers some practical advice on writing an email that’s good enough to land a book deal. | Lit Hub Craft
• Underinvestigated, trivialized, excused: Michelle Bowdler looks at a US system that treats rape as something less than a crime. | Lit Hub Politics
• “because even my homelessness / must have glory written in the margins.” Jennifer Fitzgerald’s poetry of homelessness in a pandemic. | Lit Hub
• “Baraka’s poem is a feverish, incendiary performance of paranoia that points to a contemporary crisis of the archive.” Michael Leong on Amiri Baraka’s anti-epic poem about America’s destruction. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Conversations with friends in Middle English: On the early dialogues of the Medieval period. | Lit Hub History
• “All grown-ups were once children…but only few of them remember it”: On Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. | Book Marks
• Sarah Weinman reflects on how best to chronicle our obsession with true crime. | CrimeReads
• “I’m trying to visually create the equivalent of my handwriting.” Rumaan Alam interviews Adrian Tomine. | Slate
• Mourning the end of the landline in literature, with its allowances “for fictional worlds in which people can be plausibly held apart, unable to communicate, and then convened in a single burst.” | The New Yorker
• The Bookman, a monthly literary journal founded in 1895, created the bestseller as we know it. | Lapham’s Quarterly
• These books show the power of community bonds in a time of crisis. | The Guardian
• Vanessa Springora’s memoir, Consent, which described her underage grooming by French author Gabriel Matzneff, will be adapted for film. | France24
• A literary etymology of “cake.” | Columbia Journalism Review
• “The Arctic makes itself known to us, though not always on our terms.” Andrea Pitzer on a life-changing research trip to the north. | Outside

Also on Lit Hub: Eddie Glaude on the vow James Baldwin made to young civil rights activists • Playright David Adjmi on the influence of his mother’s love of “culture” • Read from Aimee Bender’s new novel The Butterfly Lampshade.