Lit Hub Daily: July 8, 2019

• “Hope and healing sometimes happen in the midst of situations that seem utterly dire.” Kimi Eisele on finding light in the darkness of a financial dystopia. | Lit Hub
• Is the American ballpark more public space or private playground? Whitney Terrell on class, race, baseball, and a new book by Paul Goldberger. | Lit Hub
• Five books you may have missed in June, from Mauritian family sagas to an atmospheric summer potboiler. | Lit Hub
• 17th-century boys club or font of experimental learning? On the Royal Society of London. | Lit Hub
• This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Book Critics: the New York Public Library’s Melissa Gasparotto on The Princess Bride, Tara Westover’s Educated, and supporting the learning society. | Book Marks
• Poet Marie Ponsot died Friday at 98. | The New York Times
• In the golden age of television, is there still such a thing as an “unfilmable” book? | The Guardian
• “Doing the Bear – courting that involves hugging,” and more Victorian-era slang with which to impress your family and hug-friends. | Open Culture
• “The system is designed to encourage writers, and especially marginalized writers, to ignore their boundaries.” T Kira Madden, Roxane Gay, Leslie Jamison, and more on the aches and pains of nonfiction. | LARB
• PEN America members and writers, from Jhumpa Lahiri to Lara Prescott, reflect on the global crisis involving immigrants, asylum seekers, mass deportations and inhumane living conditions. | PEN America
• Read a profile of Harold Robbins, the “dirty old man of American letters”,whose scandalous, taboo-breaking novels have sold more than 750 million copies. | The Hollywood Reporter

Also on Lit Hub: Adrienne Celt talks Nabokov and the inspiration for her novel, on the New Books Network • A poem by Kim Hyesoon from her collection Autobiography of Death • Kerri Arsenault on food insecurity in small-town Maine • Read from Rawi Hage’s new novel, Beirut Hellfire Society.