Lit Hub Daily: May 27, 2021

TODAY: In 1907, Rachel Carson is born.

• “We can no longer act as though book sales do not have ethical and moral components.” Josh Cook considers booksellers’ complicity in the resurgence of white supremacy. | Lit Hub Politics

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• Bo-Young Kim recommends five sci-fi books that shaped her writing career, from mainstream lit to the speculative world of manhwa. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• The 16 best book covers of May get wet, wild, and weird. | Lit Hub

• “Since the pandemic, I have become frustrated with the linearity of time, how it speeds past us like a bullet train without stopping for us as passengers.” Cathy Park Hong remembers the summer of 2020. | Lit Hub

• Translator Mona Kareem on Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s successful mission “to save the Iraqi prose poem.” | Lit Hub Translation

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• Jocelyn Zuckerman considers how the palm oil revolution is impacting India, which imports more of the product than any other country. | Lit Hub

• James Wolcott on Philip Roth, Parul Sehgal on Doireann Ni Ghriofa, J. Robert Lennon on Rachel Cusk, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Mette Ivie Harrison on finding a balance between the angels of Mormon fiction and the murderous Mormons of popular culture. | CrimeReads

• Read a conversation between Nicholas Glastonbury and Anton Hur about how the publishing industry is failing translators. | Words Without Borders

• “I often see a story in an image, which surfaces from my subconscious with all its truth intact.” Yang Huang on her third novel, character development, and what it means to be good. | Catapult

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• How do we tell trauma stories? “I have to believe telling our trauma doesn’t need to include flaying ourselves. That it’s enough to say, This happened to me.” | Midnight Breakfast

• Ed Pavlic considers Adrienne Rich’s later poems, and her radical vision of community. | Boston Review

• “It is one of the most startling accounts of infinity that I’ve ever read.” Namwali Serpell reads William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Border­land. | The Paris Review

• “We’re definitely seeing more people who seem like they’re really willing to do the work.” Checking in with Black-owned bookstores after a year of political reckoning. | NPR

• Christine Hoxmeier recounts the process of learning to live with grief, “through stacks of books I will one day read.” | Book Riot

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Also on Lit Hub: Grant Faulkner on the pressures of living in San Francisco • Chad Hanson on the myth of the “tidy forest” • Read from Nikita Lalwani’s latest novel, You People

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