Lit Hub Daily: June 5, 2019

• Our most anticipated summer books list is here! In which the Lit Hub staff recommends some reads for the beach (or the cafe, or the porch, or the hammock, or, like, a chair.) | Lit Hub
• Celebrating 70 years of misapplied allegory: happy birthday, 1984! | Lit Hub
• It was my great good fortune to come out as a gay man in 1970.” Charles Kaiser on the painful, powerful legacies of Stonewall in 2019. | Lit Hub
• From Elton John’s piano to Woody Guthrie’s guitar, Antony DeCurtis on the instruments behind iconic rock ‘n’ roll moments. | Lit Hub
• “Between 1997 and 2015, 1,344 women were murdered in Guadalajara and across the state of Jalisco.” Life on the margins in a kingdom of cartels. | Lit Hub
• Astra Taylor wonders if democracy can survive contemporary capitalism? | Lit Hub
• The poetic half-life of one family’s nuclear history: Tyler Mills on her grandfather’s role in the bombing of Nagasaki. | Lit Hub
• Every Women’s Prize for Fiction Winner of the 21st Century: from Bel Canto to Half a Yellow Sun, The Tiger’s Wife to On Beauty. | Book Marks
• This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Booklist‘s Annie Bostrom on Alex Kotlowitz, Sharlene Teo, and the only critic who really matters. | Book Marks
• “I couldn’t shake the reality that the crime pages were offering me variations of Tom Ripley.” James Polchin on the relationship between crime fiction and the history of the “queer criminal.” | CrimeReads
• On the discourse around Sally Rooney’s books, and what’s turning out to be the essential question of our era: “has Sally Rooney written smart, literary books, or stupid female ones?” | Electric Literature
• “When Terry [Pratchett] found out that he was dying, he wrote to me and said, ‘You have to do this.’” Neil Gaiman on adapting Good Omens for the small screen—and why he’s running the show himself. | GQ
• Emma Copley Eisenberg makes the case for Sophie’s Choice as . . . the perfect summer read? | Alma
• “I’d recommend the earnest pursuit of poetry for every writer.” Read a profile of Ocean Vuong (written by his high school classmate). | The Atlantic
• How many tote bags do you have? Likely too many! Here’s how to get rid of them, you tote-hoarding monster. | The New York Times
• Read an excerpt from Ta-Nehisis Coates’ first novel, which comes out in September. | The New Yorker
• “There is no allegory crude enough to create and capture the counterfactual universe we are living in right now, with Trump and how we got here.” Jonathan Lethem on writing (and living) in the Trump era. | Salon

Also on Lit Hub: Reading Women on being poor in the richest country in the world • On Otherppl, Jennifer Pastiloff discusses making people feel heard despite her hearing loss • Hanan al-Shaykh on becoming a writer in the middle of war • Read from Alix Ohlin’s new novel Dual Citizens