Lit Hub Daily: July 9, 2020

• Freedom means can rather than should: Gabrielle Bellot on what the Harper’s open letter gets wrong. | Lit Hub Politics
• “Here you can feel the relief, like something ended and we survived, but it’s clear to me that nothing’s over yet.” Dolores Dorantes and Ben Ehrenreich discuss deserts, race-sickness, and the shape of time. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• “Call this paleo-travel: searching for what’s underneath, or for what’s no longer quite there.” André Aciman follows literary ghosts in St. Petersburg. | Lit Hub Travel
• Philosophies of distance and proximity: Corina Stan on Orwell, Murdoch, Canetti and experiments in isolation. | Lit Hub
• “Postcards from Taiwan.” Poetry by Craig Santos Perez. | Lit Hub
• “I could not hope to understand my childhood until I started out by claiming my ownership over it.” Veronica Esposito on the life-changing power of Trauma and Recovery. | Lit Hub
• Smart, beautiful, thrilling, and reckless: Camilla Läckberg finds inspiration in the vengeful heroines of 1980s romance fiction. | CrimeReads
• Conspiracy theories, Trump family secrets, Rodham revisited, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• 29 writers, including Téa Obreht, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, Charles Yu, Rachel Kushner, and Rivers Solomon, have written new short stories inspired by the pandemic for The New York Times Magazine’s Decameron Project. | The New York Times
• After six decades in the industry, publisher Nan A. Talese will retire. In addition to running her own imprint, she edited books like Schindler’s List and acquired The Handmaid’s Tale, among others. | Publishers Lunch
• “I used to be able to do this; I know I used to be able to do this. I used to be able to make love to Harrison Ford’s wife!” Treat yourself to Patricia Lockwood’s coronavirus diary. | London Review of Books
• Feeling under pressure? Check out these books on the tough choices people are forced to make in times of crisis. | The Guardian
• The plague and quarantine were deeply impactful on the writing of Shakespeare’s King Lear, as he sheltered in place and “turned again and again to the same source materials.” | Chicago Review of Books
• With the help of Oprah Winfrey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project will be adapted into “a portfolio of films, television programming and other content across studio platforms.” | The Root
• Toni Tipton Martin on food, race, and her complicated relationships with Baltimore and New York City. | The Baltimore Sun

Also on Lit Hub: The men who brought political radicalism to Oscar Wilde • Illustrating Nick Carraway’s infatuation with NYC high life • Read an excerpt from Natalie Bakopolous’ new novel Scorpionfish.