Lit Hub Daily: June 4, 2021

TODAY: In 1928, Karola Ruth Westheimer, better known as Dr. Ruth, is born. 

• “It’s hard if not impossible to see the Black and brown faces in Terrell’s cyanotype portrait project and not muse on those years that my survival was steeped in precarity.” Mitchell S. Jackson reflects on Darryl DeAngelo Terrell’s photography in the latest installment of The Longest Year: 2020+. | Lit Hub

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• How can museums reckon with colonial legacies and regain public trust? Tom Campbell, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, talks to András Szántó. | Lit Hub Art

• Why Benjamin Percy is taking a page from comic books and releasing his new trilogy—as paperbacks first—in six-month intervals. | Lit Hub

• Sara Flannery recommends sci-fi takes on reproduction, because pregnancy isn’t “all pastels and cartoon storks.” | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• How Pamela Erens got over her self-doubt about writing a middle grade novel and vowed never to condescend her 11-year-old protagonist. | Lit Hub Craft

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• Alan Maimon on reporting Appalachia and the existential crisis of newspapers in an age of clickbait and uncertainty. | Lit Hub

• INTERVIEW WITH A JOURNAL: Everything you need to know about The Sewanee Review, America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly. | Lit Hub

• “My early novels were stilted. The journals were natural in comparison, real and lacking artifice.” What Thoreau taught David Gessner about a daily writing practice. | Lit Hub Craft

• Olivia Rutigliano with a list of road trip crime films perfect for summer viewing. | CrimeReads

• New titles from Sinead O’Connor, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Kristen Arnett, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• “A mortifying proof is here given that the moral growth of a nation or an age does not always keep pace with the increase of knowledge.” Read Frederick Douglass’ 1854 commencement address. | Lapham’s Quarterly

• In conversation: Monica West and Kelsey McKinney discuss writing about religion and disillusionment. | Entertainment Weekly

• “One of the things that I argue throughout this book is that it is just being Black that is the threat.” Carol Anderson on her new book and the racist roots of the Second Amendment. | NPR Fresh Air

• This is how Jack Kerouac influenced Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir. | Publishers Weekly

• “The afterlife of the Bernhardian rant would not be so rich and varied if the world we inhabited were not so persistently hideous, terrifying, confusing, and cruel.” Dustin Illingworth on the legacy of Thomas Bernhard. | The Baffler

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• In the midst of an ongoing debate about whose voices to amplify, “publishers today are teetering on a tightrope.” | The Guardian

• “This book insisted on itself with a real force, and there were times when I felt almost powerless in the face of it.” Doireann Ní Ghríofa describes a disorienting writing process. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: Love letters to Italy: a reading list • Peter Wohllenberg considers the way we talk about forests • Read from Simon Van Booy’s latest novel, Night Came with Many Stars

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