Lit Hub Daily: May 5, 2021

• Annette Gordon-Reed on Juneteenth, an oral history of ACT UP, and a new Bob Dylan biography all feature among May’s new and noteworthy nonfiction. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

  Article continues after advertisement

• David Coggins wants you to experience the poetry of fly-fishing. | Lit Hub Sports

• “My main problem was that I’d invested too much of my identity into what I thought a writing career should look like.” Joy Lanzendorfer on her long path to publication. | Lit Hub

• Emily Hourican on the detective work required to write about women who were mere afterthoughts to a family dynasty. | Lit Hub Craft

• Why Ryan Bradley can’t stop listening to a Scottish ballad about crossing a river, during this strange liminal space of the pandemic. | Lit Hub Music

  Article continues after advertisement

• Gardens have always been essential to Indianapolis, from WWI to the urban farmers who carried on through COVID-19. | Lit Hub Food

• Charlotte Whittle on translating Norah Lange, who “developed a voice that plumbed the depths of domestic life.” | Lit Hub Translation

• 10 crime novels you should check out this May, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. | CrimeReads

• “The women of Cusk’s novels long to feel free.” Lori Feathers on the novels of Rachel Cusk. | Book Marks

• “The check mark is more important than whatever comes of the daily work whose completion you’re marking.” On the power of the humble check mark as a creative writing hack. | New York Times Magazine

  Article continues after advertisement

• Rachel York considers shame in the language of women: “Across the world, a common female language develops: you are not what you should be.” | Guernica

• How Dickinson “embraces speculation and the speculative, sexuality and seances” in order to tell the story of a woman in the absence of vast archives—and why it matters. | Electric Literature

• Jean Kyoung Frazier unpacks Korean identity, craft, her love for “slacker” characters, and MFA programs. | The Rumpus

• Stacey Abrams and Michael Connelly hop on Zoom to talk shop. | Elle

• Kate Durbin speaks to the inescapability of consumerism, hoarding, and “the existential feelings it raises.” | BOMB

  Article continues after advertisement

• Larissa Pham describes writing for other Asian women who will encounter her book as “something like a lighthouse spotting another lighthouse from far away.” | The Believer

Also on Lit Hub: How the pandemic has changed teaching high school English • A poem by Donika Kelly • Read from Thalia Field’s latest book, Personhood