Lit Hub Daily: June 1, 2020

• READINGS ON RACISM, WHITE SUPREMACY AND POLICE VIOLENCE: Aaron Robertson on George Floyd and Black pessimism · Daryl Pinckney on the American tradition of anti-Black vigilantism · Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the future of radicalism · Carol Anderson on the history of respectability politics and their failure to keep Black Americans safe · Garnette Cadogan on walking while Black ·
  On James Baldwin’s dispatches from the civil rights movement · Sherilynn A. Ifill: how small-town newspapers ignored local lynchings · Philip Dray on Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a Civil War that never ended · Ibram X. Kendi on how racism relies on arbitrary hierarchies of power · Alexandra Minna Stern on the foundational texts of white nationalism · Robin D.G. Kelley on the roots of anti-racist, anti-fascist resistance in America.
• Jill Watts recommends ten life stories of forgotten civil rights pioneers, from Mary McLeod Bethune to Claude Barnett. | Lit Hub History
• Tracing Hollywood’s racial evolution from The Birth of a Nation to BlacKkKlansman: Greg Garrett on representation and racism in American film. | Lit Hub Film
• Helen Eisenbach, editor of The Normal Heart, remembers Larry Kramer. | Lit Hub
• Sejal Shah talks to Anjali Enjeti about the tricky work of giving shape to an essay collection. | Lit Hub
• “The screen overload, the talking to friends in boxes, the overlapping voices, the weird eye contact is wearing thin.” Jessica Francis Kane looks forward to a time when we can show up again, even when it’s inconvenient. | Lit Hub
• When dreams and historical facts align: Aimee Liu finds her story in the colonial past of the Andaman Islands. | Lit Hub
• In which the only certainty is reading: it’s June’s Astrology Book Club. | Lit Hub
• The Southern Reach Trilogy, Pnin, The Secret Garden, and more rapid-fire book recs from Jenny Zhang. | Book Marks
• TV might rot your brain, but it also might fuel your reading habit. | Financial Times
• “As writers of dystopian novels know, there was no before, there was only a time when ‘it’ wasn’t quite so unavoidably visible.” Elivia Wilk on dystopian fiction, and the naming of a crisis. | Bookforum
• Spend some time down the rabbit hole of author-as-gameshow contestant, from Herman Wouk to John le Carré. | Epiphany
• Indie booksellers in Russia are trying to give a platform to marginalized writers, who have difficulty making it into the conservative mainstream. | Calvert Journal
• Harry Hoffman, the FBI agent turned bookseller who revolutionized commercial bookselling, has died at 92. | Publishers Weekly
• “Suddenly our print reserves were inaccessible to the students and researchers who needed them.” On libraries’ quick thinking and shift to virtual services during the pandemic. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Novelist Douglas Coupland’s art centers around slogans that have “unexpectedly chimed with our experience of the plague.” | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Maggie Downs talks to Heather Scott Partington about her memoir, Braver Than You Think • “Wife’s Disaster Manual”: A poem by Deborah Paradez • Read from Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning.