Lit Hub Daily: June 24, 2021

• “I began to wonder: What if I directed my drawing and everything I knew about comic art to exploring the history and culture of Black America?” Charles Johnson on his journey to celebrated cartoonist. | Lit Hub

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• Iconic blues musician Bobby Rush recalls getting burned (twice) by James Brown. | Lit Hub Music

• Boston Review staffers talk love at first sight (in the submission queue), magazines as conversations, and addressing inequality in publishing. | Lit Hub

• “As I watched my children grow, I realized that my poetic interest in them was mostly in how they sought the world beyond my wife and me.” How Wayne Miller (eventually, carefully) learned to write about his children. | Lit Hub Poetry

• For lack of an ending: how Katherine Dykstra became consumed by the search for answers in a 50-year-old homicide. | CrimeReads

• James Wolcott on James Ellroy, John Paul Brammer on Brandon Taylor, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• For Amazon workers, Prime Day isn’t a holiday—it’s a nightmare. | Jacobin

• Here are 53 LGBTQ-owned bookstores you can support during Pride Month and beyond. | Oprah Daily

• “These performances will nourish theater’s renaissance and leave the dregs of hierarchy behind.” Sabina Sethi Unni on the radical possibilities of virtual theater. | Catapult

• A deep dive on three newly discovered manuscripts by Edward Lear, one of Britain’s finest nonsense poets. | TLS

• “The insurrection at the Capitol building was supposed to be comparable to the unmasking that comes at the climax of the noir novel: a bold apprehension of the villain.” On the parallels between QAnon and classic noir. | JSTOR Daily

• Meet the book club that writes songs inspired by their latest reads. | AMNY

• Lisa Taddeo discusses the writing of her latest book and exploring “the depravity of human nature.” | Esquire

• “Women invariably get into trouble when we try to make feminism mean One Thing.” A conversation with Gina Frangello. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: Les Standiford on the humble beginnings of the American circus • Rosecrans Baldwin on border crossings and Anglo mythologies in Los Angeles • Read from Mariana Leky’s newly translated novel, What You Can See from Here (trans. Tess Lewis)