Lit Hub Daily: June 8, 2020

TODAY: In 1889, Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins dies.

• Letter from Minneapolis: Why the rebellion had to begin here. | Lit Hub Politics
• A brief history of feminist bike-riding from Hannah Ross, who finds absolutely no evidence of a fish ever needing a bicycle. | Lit Hub History
• The new Shirley Jackson biopic is basically fan fiction (and it’s also great). | Lit Hub Film
• Passion and patience: On the timeless—and timely—virtues of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian. | Lit Hub
• “Berta connected the dots from local to global.” Nina Lakhani on the late Berta Cáceres, Indigenous land activist. | Lit Hub Politics
• Emeka Joseph Nwankwo explores how women are changing the face of African publishing with a new wave of female-led presses and events. | Lit Hub
• “How do I live? I am free.” Joe Meno talks to Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal about the costs—and rewards—of a treacherous search for asylum. | Lit Hub Politics
• Fever Dream, THICK, The Boxcar Children, and more rapid-fire book recs from Catherine House author Elisabeth Thomas. | Book Marks
• “The Bronx is not going to let this bookstore close.” Noëlle Santos, the owner of The Lit. Bar, the Bronx’s only indie bookstore, on how her business is surviving right now. | The Cut
• You should probably be listening to Teju Cole’s playlists. | Brittle Paper
• A Black performer of Yiddish songs tries answering a question he’s often asked: how to translate Black Lives Matter into Yiddish? | Jewish Currents
• On the power of idioms, “the fossilized poetry of language.” | JSTOR Daily
• After Amazon pulled an ebook from COVID-19 skeptic and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, Elon Musk publicly called for the company’s dissolution. | PC Mag
• Books about racism have skyrocketed in sales recently. | Wall Street Journal
• Maxine Hong Kingston, who changed American literature with The Woman Warrior, on storytelling, Chinese-American life, and posthumously publishing her last book. | The New Yorker
• “My country has made an unreliable witness out of me—too black, too biased, too “close” to the story; the obituary they keep trying to write for us—but I still wanted to tell you what I’ve seen.” Saeed Jones on grief and protest in America. | GQ

Also on Lit Hub: A reading list for traveling beyond the home • “Plague Poem”: A poem by Katha Pollitt • Read a story by Lemya Shammat, trans. by Elisabeth Jaquette, from The Common.

 

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