Lit Hub Daily: June 11, 2019

• The beachiest, buzziest, bookiest list of them all: the ultimate books of summer 2019 preview. | Lit Hub
• “It’s an old joke among jazz musicians: ‘Can you read music?’ … ‘Not enough to hurt my playing.’” David Epstein on the genius of the self-taught musician. | Lit Hub
• She runs the world: how Beyoncé revolutionized the American political landscape. | Lit Hub
• “The best art carries this sense of inevitability, of allegory, myth, dream—a truth that has always been there.” Lauren Acampora on the links between dreamlife and creativity. | Lit Hub
• Not a Father’s Day gift guide: James Tate Hill on 5 audiobooks with complicated parent/child relationships. | Lit Hub
• A lover’s view of Picasso: on Françoise Gilot’s classic account of life with a “great man.” | Lit Hub
• Nicole Dennis-Benn, Domenica Ruta, and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub
• “This magazine is about speaking up. Will that make us bitchy? Yeah.” On the rise of the feminist internet. | Lit Hub
• John Domini recommends five great novels of Italian-American immigration, from Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim to Don DeLillo’s Underworld. | Book Marks
• “No homo, he had said. But all I heard, all I still hear, is No human. How can we not ask masculinity to change when, within it, we have become so wounded?” Ocean Vuong on masculinity and humanity. | The Paris Review
• Kristen Arnett, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and more recommend summer itineraries inspired by their novels. | Vanity Fair
• “To see myself eloquently expressed in a piece of writing we were required to read would have been the stuff of dreams.” Tochi Onyebuchi on the importance of inclusive high school reading lists. | Slate
• “The wellness industry is the diet industry, and the diet industry is a function of the patriarchal beauty standard.” Jessica Knoll is well and truly over “wellness.” | The New York Times
• “It wasn’t a foreign notion that if you had stripped people of something you might actually owe them something”: Five years after the publication of “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits this debate with David Remnick. | The New Yorker
• A timeline charts the tumultuous rise and fall of the Barnes & Noble bookselling empire. | Vulture
• An argument for why Shakespearean plays represent the efforts of multiple playwrights and actors, not just one man alone. | The Atlantic

Also on Lit Hub: On Alabama’s dark history of brutalizing black women’s bodies • What David Bowie borrowed from William Burroughs • Read from Mona Awad’s new novel, Bunny.