Lit Hub Daily: July 10, 2020

• “The exiled and returned of Fukushima find themselves cornered again by the pandemic.” Yu Miri’s view from the railways of Japan. | Lit Hub
• The rise of the feminized city: Leslie Kern on women, gentrification, and public spaces. | Lit Hub
• “Once in the vast middle of pain—pain stopped, / and a certain clarity descended.” Poetry by Cleopatra Mathis. | Lit Hub
• Megan Marshall remembers Robert D. Richardson, the precise, compassionate Emerson and Thoreau biographer. | Lit Hub
• “Peach’s death is remembered for the manifest injustice of the inquest.” On the 1979 Southall anti-racism protests and Blair Peach’s murder at the hands of police. | Lit Hub History
• Gabriella Burnham, David Goodwillie, Yiyun Li, and more take the Lit Hub Author Questionnaire. | Lit Hub
• ON THE VBC: Courtney Maum answers the questions you’re afraid to ask about book deals • Poems from quarantine with Tommy Pico, Karla Brundage, and more • Soleil Ho, Saru Jayaraman, and Caleb Zigas discuss the state of the restaurant industry. | Lit Hub
• New titles from Lynn Steger Strong, Charlie Kaufman, Ben Ehrenreich, Paul Tremblay, and Duchess Goldblatt all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, has died at 62. | Laramie Boomerang
• Channing Austin Brown discusses her memoir’s second wave of success amid the Black Lives Matter movement. | The Hollywood Reporter
• “The production, storage, and use of information about subject populations is fundamental to the work of governance, whether for good or for ill.” On the crucial role of state archives in protecting democracy. | Boston Review
• In celebration of Claudia Kishi, the coolest member of the Baby-Sitters Club. | VICE
• “Who is the bystander? Who is the institution? Can you occupy more than one role at once?” Aisha Sabatini Sloan on personal and public landmarks in Detroit. | The Paris Review
• Sarah Broom tends to avoid reading memoirs (or, Other Things You’d Like to Know About Sarah Broom’s Reading Habits). | The New York Times
• The current book purge under Xi Jinping in China isn’t the country’s first national campaign to clear out “inappropriate” works. Similar campaigns have been happening since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. | Reuters

Also on Lit Hub: How do you write a memoir of the unknown? • Read an excerpt from Ari Braverman’s debut novel The Ballad of Big Feeling.