Lit Hub Daily: July 7, 2020

• Manuel Muñoz writes a letter from Tucson: “I look out at the mountains and the fires and some story circles in my head. I try to make meaning of it.” | Lit Hub
• “He wants us to celebrate and embrace life, the moment we’re in, the voice in our heads we don’t always show to the world.” Brian Castleberry on Saul Bellow’s celebration of the messy and manic. | Lit Hub
• What we remember when we feast beside the plundered sea: Gina Rae La Cerva on the last days of the lobstering life in Maine. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• “Sometimes it takes a while to actually hear yourself talk and to have the courage to listen.” Sameer Pandya on the virtues of a late start. | Lit Hub Craft
• “My mother’s tendency to sit on bad news became a morbid sort of joke.” Rachel Beanland on family secrets and how we deliver bad news. | Lit Hub
• Hieroglyphics author Jill McCorkle recommends five books about exploring the past, from Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. | Book Marks
• Travel back in history to a time when Hot Springs, Arkansas, was a den of vice and a capital of entertainment. From David Hill. | CrimeReads
• “Imagine a world in which, one day, you learned you’d eventually be expected to give birth to, then raise, an ostrich.” R.O. Kwon on opting out of having children. | The Guardian
• “Shakespeare is too high for us creatives. He dazzles too much.” On the challenges of painting scenes from Shakespeare. | Hyperallergic
• After the Afro-Cuban novelist Hache Carrillo died of COVID earlier this year, the literary world learned he was not Afro-Cuban at all. Lisa Page reflects on her colleague’s unusual case of racial passing. | The Washington Post
• On the fiftieth anniversary of the books’ debut, authors and illustrators reflect on the profound influence of Frog and Toad. | Slate
• What does it mean for us to be living in a literary genre—that of alternate history? | The Atlantic
• The Netflix adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club has all the “old-fashioned warmth and charm” that the original series brought to a generation of readers. | Vox
• Lacy Crawford on memory, gatekeeping, and selling a sexual assault story to the literary market. | The New York Times
• “The idea was funny and dark and very DeLillo. So there it began.” On the making (and the disappearance) of the only screenplay Don DeLillo ever wrote. | The Ringer

Also on Lit Hub: Eight books you should read in July • For Florida, wartime has always been boomtime • Read from Stephanie Soileau’s debut collection, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights.