Lit Hub Daily: September 7, 2021

• How 1987’s Miss Michigan, a hospice nurse, helped change the course of the Miss America pageant. | Lit Hub History

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• “She was labeled the nymphet, I was labeled Pollyanna.” Hayley Mills on missing out on the part of Lolita to protect her Disney image. | Lit Hub Film

• “God forgive me if this letter is ever opened by mistake.” An, ahem, steamy letter from Henry Miller to Anais Nin. | Lit Hub

• Hilma Wolitzer talks to Jane Ciabattari about writing through grief, how to end a story, and losing her husband to COVID-19. | Lit Hub

• The late artist Winfred Rembert captures a peaceful civil rights demonstration in the Jim Crow South that ended in mayhem. | Lit Hub History

• My first Tamagotchi: Qian Julie Wang recalls the summer of 1998, and how her family’s purchases spoke to the American Dream. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Can Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming, Substack-published novella revive serialized fiction? | The New Republic

• Susanna Clarke considers the books that shaped her personal and creative identity. | The Guardian

• Listen to this podcast interview with Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. | Bookworm

• Claudia Rankine explores Beyoncé’s radical reimagining of what it means to be a pop icon. | Harper’s Bazaar

• Revisiting the journals of Spalding Gray. | Into

• What inspired Lauren Groff to set her new novel in a 12th-century convent? “To live in a world without men, just for a little while.” | The Star Tribune

• Dawn Turner revisits her old Chicago neighborhood, a place “where all that is good and bad is simultaneously at your fingertips” that is featured in her memoir. | Chicago Tribune

• Laura Sackton suggests bookish rituals for every day. | Book Riot

Also on Lit Hub: Celebrating Black female relationships in literature • Remembering the humble origins of Saveur • Read from Mariana Dimópulos’s newly translated novel, Imminence (tr. Alice Whitmore)