Lit Hub Daily: June 29, 2021

• “That Barthelme had such a long and fruitful relationship with The New Yorker now seems remarkable, for he was in many ways the least likely New Yorker contributor ever.” Charles McGrath on the avant-garde genius of Donald Barthelme. | Lit Hub

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• Facial recognition and AI sleuths: Geoffrey Cain traces the rise of China’s state surveillance machinery. | Lit Hub

• Get your New Books Tuesday update so you can be as cool as all those teens on BookTok. | The Hub

• How Rachelle Toarmino took a parking lot, a car, and an FM transmitter and created a literary drive-in for her debut book. | Lit Hub

• On the flawed framing of domestic violence as a private issue: Hanna Halperin considers insularity and barriers for victims on Martha’s Vineyard. | Lit Hub

• “I think your intuition of where home is becomes most potent when you’ve finally left it and there’s no possibility of returning.” Tom Lin talks about the Chinese diaspora, literary field work, and his debut novel. | Lit Hub

• Rachel Syme contemplates the purpose of deadlines and the impact of “the deadline effect” on working creatives. | The New Yorker

• “Vulnerability in writing is a precision tool.” On the inherent difficulty of writing personal essays and the first-person industrial complex. | Catapult

• “People say, ‘What’s your process?’ My process is allowing my soul to leave my body and enter into the body of another human being. So try that!” Francine Prose discusses her latest novel, The Vixen. | The New York Times

• A New American Heroine: Tayari Jones on Sapphire’s Push. | The Guardian

• In honor of what would have been Princess Diana’s 60th birthday, Kristen Radtke illustrates the loneliness that was inextricable from her public appeal. | Vanity Fair

• “From whence emerged this withholding, cold, self-centered and often cruel man?” Daphne Merkin on Philip Roth as a writer and seducer. | n+1

• Meet the founders of Hajar Press, an independent publisher with an explicitly anti-racist mission. | The Quietus

Also on Lit Hub: Larissa Pham on art and intimacy • How a surprising trespasser inspired Beck Dorey-Stein’s first novel • Read from Francine Prose’s latest novel, The Vixen