Lit Hub Daily: June 29, 2017

• Charles Simic writes poetry in the dark (literally): in conversation with a great American poet. | Literary Hub
• A book festival in paradise grapples with its own contradictions. | Literary Hub
• Caite Dolan-Leach wonders why we love to read about missing girls? | Literary Hub
• Is Singapore the world capital of the crime cozy? | Literary Hub
• Scott Spencer couldn’t let go of his characters, so he just wrote another novel about them. | Literary Hub
• Dizzyingly surrealistic: a 1976 review of Renata Adler’s “quintessentially New York” Speedboat. | Book Marks
• Michael Bond, the creator of “the polite, good-natured but disaster-prone little hero” Paddington Bear, has died at 91. | The New York Times
• How the American superrich have “empowered a new kind of thinker—the ‘thought leader’—at the expense of the much-fretted-over ‘public intellectual.’” | The New Republic
• The recent craze for adult coloring books apparently has an 18th-century precedent: Robert Sayer’s The Florist. | Hyperallergic
• “Renewal happens on every level. Nature rewiring itself, regreening and regrowing itself, with everyone involved in a sort of statewide coming out.” Marlon James on Minnesota summers. | Star Tribune
• Philip Pullman has raised £32,400 for residents affected by the Grenfell Tower fire; a character in his next book will be named Nur Huda el-Wahabi after a student who died in the tragedy. | The Guardian
• “[Joseph] Mitchell and [Ralph] Ellison’s friendship has never been documented, as far as I know, but here in the preserved debris of Mitchell’s life, Ellison fills an entire folder.” On a friendship hidden in the archives. | The Paris Review
• Why you’ve never heard of Breece D’J Pancake, a “hillbilly Hemingway” who “may have been the best American writer of his generation.” | The Millions

Also on Lit Hub: Playlist for a classic novel: Toni Morrison’s Beloved: from Nina Simone to Regina Carter · From prison life to the dark streets of Prague: 5 crime must-reads for July · Get a first look at Amatka, Karin Tidbeck’s latest novel.