TODAY: In 1807, Samuel Taylor Coleridge founds The Friend, a weekly periodical; he finances the journal by selling over five hundred subscriptions, over two dozen of which were sold to members of Parliament. Although it was often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers, it ran for 25 issues and was republished in book form a number of times.
- READINGS ON RACISM, WHITE SUPREMACY AND POLICE VIOLENCE: Aaron Robertson on George Floyd and Black pessimism · Daryl Pinckney on the American tradition of anti-Black vigilantism · Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the future of radicalism · Carol Anderson on the history of respectability politics and their failure to keep Black Americans safe · Garnette Cadogan on walking while Black ·
On James Baldwin’s dispatches from the civil rights movement · Sherilynn A. Ifill: how small-town newspapers ignored local lynchings · Philip Dray on Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a Civil War that never ended · Ibram X. Kendi on how racism relies on arbitrary hierarchies of power · Alexandra Minna Stern on the foundational texts of white nationalism · Robin D.G. Kelley on the roots of anti-racist, anti-fascist resistance in America. - Jill Watts recommends ten life stories of forgotten civil rights pioneers, from Mary McLeod Bethune to Claude Barnett. | Lit Hub History
- Tracing Hollywood’s racial evolution from The Birth of a Nation to BlacKkKlansman: Greg Garrett on representation and racism in American film. | Lit Hub Film
- Helen Eisenbach, editor of The Normal Heart, remembers Larry Kramer. | Lit Hub
- Sejal Shah talks to Anjali Enjeti about the tricky work of giving shape to an essay collection. | Lit Hub
- “The screen overload, the talking to friends in boxes, the overlapping voices, the weird eye contact is wearing thin.” Jessica Francis Kane looks forward to a time when we can show up again, even when it’s inconvenient. | Lit Hub
- When dreams and historical facts align: Aimee Liu finds her story in the colonial past of the Andaman Islands. | Lit Hub
- In which the only certainty is reading: it’s June’s Astrology Book Club. | Lit Hub
- The Southern Reach Trilogy, Pnin, The Secret Garden, and more rapid-fire book recs from Jenny Zhang. | Book Marks
- TV might rot your brain, but it also might fuel your reading habit. | Financial Times
- “As writers of dystopian novels know, there was no before, there was only a time when ‘it’ wasn’t quite so unavoidably visible.” Elivia Wilk on dystopian fiction, and the naming of a crisis. | Bookforum
- Spend some time down the rabbit hole of author-as-gameshow contestant, from Herman Wouk to John le Carré. | Epiphany
- Indie booksellers in Russia are trying to give a platform to marginalized writers, who have difficulty making it into the conservative mainstream. | Calvert Journal
- Harry Hoffman, the FBI agent turned bookseller who revolutionized commercial bookselling, has died at 92. | Publishers Weekly
- “Suddenly our print reserves were inaccessible to the students and researchers who needed them.” On libraries’ quick thinking and shift to virtual services during the pandemic. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Novelist Douglas Coupland’s art centers around slogans that have “unexpectedly chimed with our experience of the plague.” | The Guardian
Also on Lit Hub: Maggie Downs talks to Heather Scott Partington about her memoir, Braver Than You Think • “Wife’s Disaster Manual”: A poem by Deborah Paradez • Read from Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning.
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