TODAY: In 1822, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns in the Ligurian Sea. His body, washed up ten days later on the beach near Viareggio, is cremated in the presence of Lord Byron and Edward John Trelawny, who claims to have seized Shelley’s heart from the flames.
- Tear them down: Siri Hustvedt on old statues, bad science, and a history of American ideas that just won’t die. | Lit Hub Politics
- Climate crisis reading: Books by Mario Alejandro Ariza, Ben Ehrenreich, Mary Robinette Kowal, and more (to add to your TBR pile this month). | Lit Hub Climate Change
- “The career EMTs were getting hazard pay. We volunteers weren’t. So why were we putting our lives on the line?” Maya Alexandri on the life of an EMT during a pandemic. | Lit Hub
- “I wrote my memoir for the same reason I came shooting: to understand how people can be forced into silence.” Lacy Crawford’s scenes from a gun range. | Lit Hub
- “Have you considered socialism?” Andrew Martin on the politics of fictional characters. | Lit Hub Craft
- In lieu of the Olympics: Elise Hooper presents a winning reading list for your sports fix. | Lit Hub Sports
- “The North.” A poem by Karen Solie. | Lit Hub
- Kristen Lepionka gives us a primer on the recent history of queer women detectives in crime fiction. | CrimeReads
- Louise Erdrich all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of 2020 (so far). | Book Marks
- Wide Sargasso Sea, Alice in Wonderland, Flights, and more rapid-fire book recs from Douglas A. Martin. | Book Marks
- “Books should be for pleasure. If all Black books were about racism, where would we be able to escape it and get away from it?” Rumaan Alam interviews Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, America’s oldest Black book imprint. | Slate
- David Treuer on the pandemic, Native American communities, and holding a “sense of common purpose.” | New York Review of Books
- How does a novel express silence? Two books from Latin America take different approaches. | Public Books
- For a dose of pandemic travel porn: Rick Steves recalls his visits to some of Europe’s great libraries. | Luxury Travel Advisor
- “I found it as haunting as anything I’ve read in this bewildering year.” Willa Cather’s “quietly shattering” One of Ours is worth revisiting. | The New Yorker
- China’s new national security law requires Hong Kong schools to remove books that are “outdated” and involve “serious crime or socially and morally unacceptable [acts].” | CNN
- A Terry Pratchett short story collection will be posthumously published this fall. | The Guardian
Also on Lit Hub: Two poems by Joanna Klink • Behind the Republican judge-picking machine • Read an excerpt from Diana Clarke’s debut novel Thin Girls.
