Lit Hub Daily: June 18, 2021

• Jennette Gordon-Reed and Elizabeth Hinton talk to Jelani Cobb about their new books, On Juneteenth and America on Fire, and the nation’s ongoing struggle to make sense of protest and rebellion, from emancipation to the murder of George Floyd. | Lit Hub Politics

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• How the legacy of slavery warps the world for Black women: read an excerpt from Rebecca Hall’s graphic memoir, Wake. | Lit Hub Memoir

• “What if someone had put a book in my hands instead of a ball?” Brandon P. Fleming on representation as lens, discovering Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, and righting his miseducation. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Originality, self-knowledge, hatred of clichés, and seven more tips Robert McKee recommends for creating convincing characters. | Lit Hub Craft

• Confessions of a helicopter parent: how writing about children in peril helped Jonathan Evison reconcile with life’s uncertainties. | Lit Hub

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• Christine Platt considers the toxic cycle of bargain shopping and emotionally driven shopping sprees. | Lit Hub

• Cal Flyn on the self-seeding ecosystems emerging on Scotland’s abandoned man-made sites, which “remind us that, even in the most desperate of circumstances, all is not yet lost.” | Lit Hub Nature

• Acclaimed journalist and longtime New Yorker contributor Janet Malcolm has died at 87. | The Hub

• Anya Jaremko-Greenwold reflects on the transformative power of The Phantom Tollbooth. | Catapult

• “Writing is a bit like therapy; I had stuff to work out.” Alex Michaelides on his new psychological thriller and the creative process. | Entertainment Weekly

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• Rosecrans Baldwin considers the present incarnation of Los Angeles and his relationship to the city. | Full Stop

• “I feel like I’m an unusually wordy cartoonist.” Alison Bechdel talks to Kristen Radke. | The Believer

• What’s behind artists’ and writers’ fascination with soap bubbles? | JSTOR Daily

• “Daddy Was a Number Runner was one of a handful of novels of the time that took the perspective of Black girls seriously, attending to their simultaneously brutal and tender realities.” In praise of the under-recognized work of Louise Meriwether. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Danielle Henderson on late-stage Catholicism, lying, and communion • Andrea Scrima finds connectioms between American mythmaking and political deceptions • Read from Mohammed Kheir’s newly translated novel, Slipping (trans. Robin Moger)