Lit Hub Daily: July 30, 2019

• “The wall fell back. The roof of the barracks lifted. Midori’s face was brighter than daylight.” Brandon Shimoda on finding his grandfather’s photo in a Japanese internment camp. | Lit Hub
• The books that bear the weight of the living: Angelique Stevens on what her mom’s library truly meant. | Lit Hub
• Read a brief (and awful) history of the lobotomy. | Lit Hub
• “Are you ready to deal with, and have on your conscience, tortured and mutilated cats?” What happens when Satanists try to build a public monument? | Lit Hub
• “I am robustly optimistic about poetry, but that is maybe the only thing I am optimistic about.” A.E. Stallings and Peter Mishler in conversation. | Lit Hub
• On the “field of ruins” order. The story of Hitler’s last desperate plan to destroy Paris. | Lit Hub
• The Cuban Comedy author Pablo Medina recommends five essential Cuban novels, from Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World to Wendy Guerra’s Everyone Leaves. | Book Marks
• Kalisha Buckhanon on growing up amidst an epidemic of missing black women, and gradually coming to understand the dangers of an indifferent system. | CrimeReads
• Historians have an ambitious plan to create a “Fragmentarium,” a database that would hold all known ancient text fragments in the world—and hopefully make it easier for A.I. to decipher the missing sections. | Tech Xplore
• “Every culture is built on defense mechanisms. We try to suppress everything that’s not comfortable for us.” Read a profile of “Poland’s preëminent novelist,” Olga Tokarczuk. | The New Yorker
• The Netflix miniseries Typewriter, a haunted house mystery, pays homage to Indian pulp fiction from the 1960s and 70s. | Popmatters
• A taxonomy of human gestures: The late French author François Caradec’s Dictionary of Gestures is part of a tradition of illustrated guides to body language (which isn’t as universal as it may seem). | National Post
• “Marcel Proust, after countless rejections, reportedly paid a publishing house to publish Swann’s Way. Miracles do happen.” On the pros and cons of self-publishing. | San Francisco Chronicle
• Never underestimate the power of Reese Witherspoon: Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing has sold more than a million print copies this year. | Publishers Weekly
• What true crime (and true crime book) took place in your home state, you ask? Here is a map with the answer you seek. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Using an inner cheerleader to find writerly confidence • “Rotation,” a poem by Dunya Mikhail • Read a story from Jordi Puntí’s collection This Is Not America (tr. Julie Wark).