Lit Hub Daily: June 17, 2020

• What is an escapist read in 2020? Deborah Shapiro suggests some fiction for the unsettling moods of summer. | Lit Hub
• Stacey Abrams on the urgency of voter registration, and how it became a focus on her political career. | Lit Hub Politics
• Surrounded by screens, what has lockdown meant for individual self-image? Liesl Schillinger considers the endless mirrors of pandemic life. | Lit Hub
• Dreams, solitude, and stained envelopes: Moyra Davey reads Robert Walser and Jean Genet deep into the night. | Lit Hub
• “That art and activism go hand in hand is not even a question.” Willow Curry on the relationship between art and action. | Lit Hub Politics
• Let us now praise Juliet Stevenson, brilliant audiobook narrator and seemingly effortless explicator of text. | Lit Hub
• “Her adversaries are more likely to be attitudes and ideas than menacing brutes or homicidal masterminds.” Marlowe Benn on the feminist mysteries of Carolyn Heilbrun. | CrimeReads
• Each of these five acclaimed audiobook narrators has received AudioFile’s Golden Voice Lifetime Achievement Award. | Book Marks
• Author Janie Chang recounts the perilous effort to safeguard one of the most important texts in Chinese literature, the Siku Quanshu, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. | TIME
• Still don’t know why you should capitalize “Black” (and not “white”)? Here’s an explainer from the Columbia Journalism Review. | CJR
• Reni Eddo-Lodge is the first Black British author to top the UK’s book charts after interest surged in her 2017 book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. | The Guardian
• Online storytimes have proliferated during the pandemic, but do they violate copyright law? | American Libraries
• Newsletters, long phone chats, and personally delivered orders: how Manhattan bookstore Three Lives & Company is making it work right now. | New York Magazine
• Rumi’s Islamic identity is often erased in Western interpretations of his work. A new online campaign, Rumi Was Muslim, seeks to rectify that. | The New Arab
• E-books, wi-fi, and a whole lot of self-help: how libraries are adapting to new demands during the pandemic. | NPR

Also on Lit Hub: Life during a post-policy presidency • “Blood”: A poem by Lorna Cervantes • Read an excerpt from Thomas Legendre’s new novel Keeping Time.