Lit Hub Daily: June 24, 2020

• Vivian Gornick on the forgotten first wife of Victorian novelist George Meredith—and the “inspired conjecture” of Diane Johnson’s alternative biography of her. | Lit Hub
• Looking for Middle-Earth? Explore the (middle-)English landscapes that influenced a young Tolkien. | Lit Hub
• “I’ve come to believe that ‘Religion is stupid’ is an inherently hazardous way to think.” Marie Mutsuki Mockett wonders if there’s a better way for the left to talk about American Christianity. | Lit Hub Politics
• Lauren Sandler navigates the two maps of New York City, and finds the city’s block-to-block inequality is as stark as ever. | Lit Hub Politics
• “The United States of America came into being as a contractual agreement, a means to an end for the parties involved.” Colin Woodard on the early days of a search for nationhood. | Lit Hub History
• A month of literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of June. | Book Marks
• Kate McLaughlin celebrates a new wave of fictional characters who are bent, but not broken. | CrimeReads
• “It is getting better, in big and important ways. But beautiful, white, thin, symmetrical, straight, cis women still rule the realms of magic.” Rosamund Lannin on searching for body positivity in fantasy literature. | Tor
• “Translation itself is fluid, a queer form.” Gnaomi Siemens on translating the Ancient Female Voice as queer. | Words Without Borders
• Masatsugu Ono on “the in-between space of translation” and the style that develops when writers work across languages. | The Paris Review
• Booksellers are stocking John Bolton’s memoir, though many of them have caveats. | Publishers Weekly
• Why reading books by Black science fiction writers—“our most comprehensive hopers”—can help white people unlearn racism. | The Mary Sue
• On Dodie Bellamy, the renegade writer who helped define the New Narrative literary movement in 1970s San Francisco. | The Nation
• Emily Dickinson’s first meeting with her longtime pen pal Thomas Wentworth Higginson turned into a conversation about cooking, self-expression, reading and more. | The Atlantic

Also on Lit Hub: Inside the creation of a Girl Scout troop unlike any other • Read from Spencer Wolff’s debut novel The Fire in His Wake.