Lit Hub Daily: June 15, 2020

• Spiritualists, idealists, cultists, and more: Tara Isabella Burton presents a reading list on the search for deeper meaning in times of despair. | Lit Hub
• “This’ll hurt me more.” Camille Dungy sends a poem from Denver. | Lit Hub
• “It was an epoch of squandered opportunities, shattered economics, and increased polarization.” Garrett Peck on a(nother) decade from hell: the first of the 21st century. | Lit Hub
• Is Ball Four the greatest baseball memoir ever written? Mitchell Nathanson makes the case for Jim unfiltered look at athletes’ lives. | Lit Hub Sports
• “Environmental writing is a crucible for the literary fusion of art and science.” On the role of scientific data in climate literature. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• Geek Love, The Secret History, Giovanni’s Room, and more rapid-fire book recs from The Lightness author Emily Temple. | Book Marks
• When will publishing reckon with the “conservative publishing industrial complex”? | The New Republic
• Join Lit Hub and the Royal Society of Literature in celebrating Mrs. Dalloway and Dalloway Day this week! | The Hub
• The long history of blaming the devout during a plague: Alan Mikhail on Islamophobia then and now. | Lit Hub History
• Some bookstore owners are feeling conflicted about the surge in white readers buying anti-racist books. | Gothamist
• Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, set during the height of the AIDS epidemic, is “a story of leaky emotional and physical borders.” | New York Review of Books
• “This is a history-making moment.” Bernardine Evaristo on the Black writers that are topping bestseller lists. | BBC
• The owners of the Tattered Cover, a popular independent bookstore in Denver, are facing increasing pressure to support BIPOC communities after claiming neutrality on racial injustice. | Publishers Weekly
• To celebrate Bloomsday this year (June 16), you can watch a 30-hour marathon reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Bring snacks. | The Irish Post

Also on Lit Hub: Willie Perdomo on poetry as a decolonial practice • “December”: A poem by Jaquira Diaz • Read from Jean Kyoung Frazier’s debut novel Pizza Girl.