Lit Hub Daily: June 23, 2021

• What’s in an epigraph, anyway? Thomas Swick in praise of that “ceremonial gate.” | Lit Hub

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• “Medicine needs to become actively antiracist.” Elinor Cleghorn on healthcare’s insidious race and gender problem. | Lit Hub Health

• How is it that we’re capable of imitating consciousness, yet we don’t understand what consciousness is? Stephen Marche considers AI, machine learning, and “the labyrinth of another’s being.” | Lit Hub Tech

• Gaslighting in fiction: Jennifer Baker finds reflections in the psychological abuse captured in Clare Beams’ The Illness Lesson and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life. | Lit Hub Criticism

• “Through these fictional girls, I learned how much the church gave me, and not just how much it took.” Kelsey McKinney on writing about faith to reckon with the loss of her own. | Lit Hub Religion

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• Jenny Lawson talks to John Scalzi about mental health, opening a bookstore during the pandemic, and her unofficial role as Den Mother of Misfits. | Lit Hub

• “Why is it so hard to think of main characters who grieve?” Nicci French examines the place of loss of thrillers. | CrimeReads

• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tender Is the Night, The Sound and the Fury, and more rapid-fire book recs from Susan Minot. | Book Marks

• Bianca Stone on Emily Dickinson, strip clubs, and grieving over the loss of her grandmother. | Guernica

• Inside the weird, lost world of Depression-era travel guides. | The Atlantic

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• “I wanted to write about a character having a mental health crisis from the inside and not as an observer watching a person go to pieces.” Brandon Taylor discusses depictions of mental health. | GQ

• In defense of messy bookshelves. | The Washington Post

• Parul Sehgal considers “the new hive of capacious thinking” provoked by notions of consent. | The New York Times

• “I often have to ’translate’ a second time when I explain to editors my decision to resist the white gaze.” Yilin Wang addresses bias in translation from East Asian languages. | Words Without Borders

• Learn how to decolonize your bookshelf. | Book Riot

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Also on Lit Hub: Amy Sackville asks, what if procrastination is essential to the writing process? • Sports are sad: Emily Thomas Mani on winning and losing (i.e. living and dying) • Read from Joani Elliott’s debut novel, The Audacity of Sara Grayson