Lit Hub Daily: June 2, 2021

• “In Mean Girls, calling someone a lesbian is treated as an insult unto itself; it’s the worst version of ‘grotsky little byotch.’” Grace Perry considers what she internalized during her 75ish viewings of the 2004 cult classic. | Lit Hub Film

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• What kinds of stories get to attain the status of modern myth? Philip Ball has some thoughts. | Lit Hub  

• Jess McHugh on the cultural force of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, which dictated “what it meant to be a good wife and mother.” | Lit Hub Food

• “We were born weirdos, and New York offered no resistance to that.” How 80s New York spawned the Lunachicks. | Lit Hub Music

• Encode, store, retrieve, repeat: Lauren Aguirre explains how we recover past experiences… and formulate fake ones. | Lit Hub Science

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• “Parenting, like writing, is an art, and no one has infinite time for both.” Teresa Fazio watches The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien. | Lit Hub Film

• Six books that showed Daisy Hernández she doesn’t have to separate her journalism practice from her memoir practice. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• WATCH: At the Hay Festival, Stephen Fry talks to Peter Scott Morgan and Caleb Azumah Nelson talks to Candice Brathwaite. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

• Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, The Amber Spyglass, and more rapid-fire book recs from Beth O’Leary. | Book Marks

• Queer thrillers, high-concept mysteries, and plenty of noir: June’s best new crime and mystery novels. | CrimeReads

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• “It’s not only publishing, I think it’s a lot of industries that are mostly white where we commodify Blackness, where you only need this one version of this thing for this one purpose.” Zakiya Dalila Harris on her debut novel, characterization, and her experiences in publishing. | NPR Weekend Edition

• “Irony can be a numbing response to political and cultural malaise… but it can also be a form of defiance born of rage and pain.” Christian Lorentzen considers the irony drought in contemporary literature. | Bookforum

• Michelle Zauner talks about the differences between recording an album and writing a book, making art in quarantine, and DIY. | The Creative Independent

• Listen to this podcast with Clint Smith, who discusses his new narrative nonfiction book about the history of American slavery. | Kirkus

• A love letter to the letter X, signifier of the mysterious, expansive, and unknown. | New York Times Magazine

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• Kristen Arnett describes the writing routine that helps her “lean into a scene with abandon.” | Interview Magazine

• For the audiobook of Four Hundred Souls, 87 narrators came together “to share 400 years of the African American experience.” | BookPage

Also on Lit Hub: Heidi Seaborn on sleeplessness, ambien dependency, and unexpected muses • Indie booksellers recommend their favorites • Read from Tom Lin’s debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu