Lit Hub Daily: June 30, 2020

• “Without concrete relief in sight, pot-banging can’t work—there is no interracial catharsis in black struggle, no particular relief.” Emily Owens on banners, thanks-giving, and grief. | Lit Hub
• For the continuing beautification of your isolation bookshelves, we turn to the best book covers of June. | Lit Hub
• “When the war is over, its orphans are left to negotiate the peace.” Jaswinder Bolina on befriending his neighbor, nephew of Nazis. | Lit Hub History
• Calvin Baker on the pursuit of Blackness on This Is Us, in the form of Randall the Ubermensch. | Lit Hub TV
• Two pandemics, 60 years apart, and the lessons stay the same: Petru Popescu on living through polio and coronavirus. | Lit Hub
• Announcing the winners of the CLMP Firecracker Awards. | The Hub
• Sarah Neilson recommends 13 of the most anticipated books by Indigenous authors for the second half of 2020. | Book Marks
• R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell are coming out with a fiction anthology on kink. | O, The Oprah Magazine
• Phyllis Wheatley, Lucy Terry Prince, David Walker—these were some of the many Black writers who shaped Boston’s literary landscape in its earliest days. | The Boston Musical Intelligencer
• “She believes in the itching and the ornery and the oddly shaped, and has been trying to produce fiction that feels as irreducible to simple meanings”: On the “unruly genius” of Joyce Carol Oates. | The New Yorker
• Is this series—about “a sentient world suffering under corporate and military exploitation, and how one disabled woman began to fight back”—the best SF climate fiction you’ve never heard of? | Tor
• “The proliferation of ‘Black Lists’ renders a rich repository of intellectual labor into the equivalent of a trash heap of algorithms.” Book critic Rich Benjamin on the pros and cons of anti-racism reading lists. | The Intercept
• “You’d think from the reaction of the critical press it was the most terrible thing you can do to a reader, expect them to pay attention to a book. That interests me.” Colin Barrett and Eimear McBride in conversation. | Hazlitt
• Please don’t spend your hard-earned money on any of those memoirs from craven former Trump staffers—Laura Miller read (almost) all of them for you. | Slate

Also on Lit Hub: What makes marijuana dispensaries essential businesses? • In praise of the dream-logic of speculative fiction • Read an excerpt from Diksha Bashu’s new novel, Destination Wedding.