Lit Hub Daily: July 30, 2021

• Discovering a piece of the moon’s primordial crust, and other highlights from Apollo 15’s three days in a geologic wonderland. | Lit Hub History

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• If “cities demonstrate their essential character when responding to a crisis,” what will New York City show when it (inevitably) floods again? | Lit Hub

• Iranian-American Pardis Mahdavi considers hyphenate identities and her favorite books that explore belonging through language. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “The connection between Faulkner’s fiction and the slaves who helped build the University of Mississippi helps us see a new narrative that is evolving.” W. Ralph Eubanks probes into the origins of Absalom, Absalom!. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Read Juan David Gastolomendo’s speculative fiction, “Stateless: 2053,” kickstarted in PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud workshop. | Lit Hub

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• INTERVIEW WITH AN INDIE PRESS: Janaka Stucky of Black Ocean talks about entering publishing as a self-described “outsider” and the freedom of independent press life. | Lit Hub

• Are 1980s noir films better than their 1940s predecessors? Keith Roysdon has a controversial answer. | CrimeReads

• WATCH: Jonathan Rapping on how to end mass incarceration in America. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

• “Dentists, though, sanitize our mouths. They’re the oral street sweepers, the inadvertent voiders, of all our bibliophilic romps.” On the underappreciated literature of the dentist. | Zocalo Public Square

• “I don’t believe in groups, in tribes. I really believe in one thing: the individual.” Leïla Slimani on colonialism, identity, and writing. | Words Without Borders

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• Benjamin Dreyer remembers his mother on what would have been her 92nd birthday. | USA Today

• “Writing shouldn’t be too concerned with getting things exactly right; the obsession with being right will ruin a writer.” Read a previously unreleased interview with Anthony Veasna So. | Soft Punk

• Jamie Figueroa traces the struggles that shaped her identity in Puerto Rico, Ohio, and beyond. | Elle

• “We set out to write a straightforward suspense, and of course that’s not what it turned out to be at all.” Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman discuss their new novel and workplace culture. | Bitch Media

Also on Lit Hub: A conversation with Danielle A. Jackson, the new editor of The Oxford American • Five books that capture the essence (and agony) of coming of age • Read “Everyday Parenting Tips,” a story from Simon Rich’s latest collection, New Teeth