• “The world and its martinis are mine!” Dwight Garner looks at martinis and the writers who love(d) them, including Patricia Highsmith (quoted), Karl Ove Knausgaard, and more. | Lit Hub Food (& Drink)

• KJ Dell’Antonia on the rules of literary magic. | Lit Hub Craft

• “To recognize fascism’s anachronism is cold comfort.” Alberto Toscano considers what “fascist” really means today. | Lit Hub Politics

• Beyond “how-to”: A reading list for understanding the “how-comes” of contemporary life. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Is ketamine therapy all it’s hyped up to be? | Lit Hub Science

• “The case might be made for Werner Herzog, in documentaries and features and novels, as the narrator of our time, or at least of his time.” Samuel Rutter on Herzog’s voice. | Dirt

• Penguin Random House has launched the Freedom of Expression Prize, which asks teens to write about a banned book that changed their life. | The Guardian

• On Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, “the longest, least-remembered Great American Novel.” | The New Yorker

• “To act at all today—in relation to communities, in relation to the climate—requires an embrace of one’s own insignificance in the larger scheme of things.” Jasmine Liu on Lydia Davis’s stories and politics. | The New Republic

• In the new issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Marguerite Bunce tells the story of a lost dog in rural France. | Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

• Nancy Conyers on her Aunt Helen’s wailing wall: “She helped me envision a day when I too would be able to travel to faraway places.” | The Keepthings

Also on Lit Hub: The recurring dreams of Roz Chast • Christopher Kennedy on defining prose poetry and working-class stories • Read from K-Ming Chang’s latest novel, Organ Meats

• “Beneath the headlines of blockbusters and bestsellers, underneath the froth of the book fairs, something is terribly wrong.” Why Toni Morrison left jer job in publishing. | Lit Hub History

• Jesmyn Ward! Tim O’Brien! Here are 25 new books out today. | The Hub

• Lucy Sante considers the poetic evolution of Bob Dylan. | Lit Hub Music

• How likely is it that aliens could get to our solar system? | Lit Hub Space!

• Why you should read the forgotten essays of Louisa May Alcott, whose “writing genius defied genre.

• “Always I find more answers in a forest than I find in my own hot attic of a mind.” Margaret Renkl on foraging for fungi (instead of writing). | Lit Hub

• Why you should read the forgotten essays of Louisa May Alcott, whose “writing genius defied genre.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• “It shouldn’t be hard to prove that you’re a person—but Britney has been so often ignored and misunderstood, used up and thrown away.” Christine Smallwood on The Woman in Me. | Vulture

• Are our attention spans really getting shorter? | The Guardian

• “I decided, soon after Vincent’s death, to stop pondering the alternatives. What if belongs to fiction; what now, to this real life.” Yiyun Li reflects on gardening and grief. | The New Yorker

• Jeanette Winterson on the place for ghosts in the metaverse. | The Paris Review

• “Should authors of poems and novels view chatbots as creative collaborators or as formal containers?” Terry Nguyen reviews three new novels co-written with AI. | Boston Review

Also on Lit Hub: Marie NDiaye on a novel’s twists and turns • A reading list of meta-narrators • Read from Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, Let Us Descend

• “The more Stoicism I read, the more I realized that FOMO has always been around.” How to deal with a no-so-modern problem. | Lit Hub Philosophy

• Allyson McCabe muses on Sinead O’Connor, misogyny, and the powerful ramifications of framing a story. | Lit Hub Biography

• Behind the scenes of a globemaker’s studio. | Lit Hub Art

• Why Anne Boleyn, second of King Henry VII’s six wives, captured our collective imagination. | Lit Hub History

• Curtis Chin on finding his voice while narrating his memoir. | Lit Hub Memoir

• “I’m still looking at the ceiling. No flies anymore. I make some tea but forget to sip it. Now dust from the two explosions is settling on the couches, rug, and table.” Mosab Abu Toha writes from Gaza. | The New Yorker

• Laura Miller considers The Pigeon Tunnel, Errol Morris’s new documentary about John le Carré. | Slate

• Emily Wilson on the life and work of Edith Hamilton, “a retired Latin schoolteacher with limited formal education and almost no scholarly credentials [who became] one of the most influential “classicists” of the 20th century.” | The Nation

• Eve Bunting, author of more than 250 children’s books including Smoky Night and Spying on Miss Muller, has died at 94. | The New York Times

• “Deja vu. Doubling. Doppelgangers.” Lincoln Michel offers advice for evoking the eerie in fiction. | Counter Craft

Also on Lit Hub: Rosalynn Tyo on the new adaptation of Lessons in Chemistry • How some words do (or don’t) make it into print • Read from Tim O’Brien’s latest novel, America Fantastica      

• “The fact that literature is not helpless is proven by the fact that it attracts power.” Nobel Laureate  on a lifetime of art and activism. | Lit Hub

• John Freeman says goodbye to Freeman’s: “It can make you feel a bit gloomy, unless you accept that like New York City itself, literary magazines are by nature—most of them, not all—meant to be ephemeral.” | Lit Hub

• Pamela Newton reflects on Alexander Stille’s The Sullivanians, and the realities and narratives of her childhood in an urban commune. | Lit Hub Memoir

• “The ambition of the book is to tell the whole story of Israel/Palestine.” Nathan Thrall talks to Masha Gessen about his new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• Despite some pitfalls, writes Olivia Rutigliano, Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon remains a haunting, massive achievement. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Teju Cole’s Tremor, Sly Stone’s Thank You, and Marie Ndiaye’s Vengeance is Mine all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Allison Epstein considers the intersection of folk tales and horror. | CrimeReads

• Kevin Young, Elisa Gonzalez, and more writers remember Louise Glück. | The New Yorker

• “The most difficult challenge in our lives is to face our contributions to the systems that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence.” Sarah Schulman on the Hamas-Israel War. | New York Magazine

• “She is remapping where we believe we must look if we are to understand [American] history and the world it has created.” Imani Perry profiles Jesmyn Ward. | The New York Times Magazine

• “Ye’s vicissitudes trouble me in particular because I had a father once. He was brave and chaotic too. Awful and beautiful too. A workaholic full of ennui too.” Harmony Holiday on Kanye West. | The Paris Review

• Sophie Gilbert ponders Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl adaptations and what they tell viewers about both artists. | The Atlantic

• Florence Hazrat considers the exclamation point! | The Millions

• Canadian authors including Yann Martel, Alix Ohlin, and Heather O’Neill weigh in on their books being used to train AI. | The Walrus

• In the face of the rising tide of bans, Scholastic is taking the cowardly stance of allowing schools to opt out of providing diverse books at its bookfairs. | NPR

• “What there isn’t, and what there never is, is a genius every three months. This is something promoted by the publishing industry, and not just publishing, but every single walk of life you can imagine.” Sophie Vershbow interviews Fran Lebowitz. | Esquire

• A 21-year-old computer scientist used machine learning to read a 2,000-year-old scroll that was buried under volcanic ash in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Neat! | Vice

• Emily Zarevich considers Sylvia Plath’s fascination with bees. | JSTOR Daily

• Your local Barnes & Noble may be getting a makeover. | The New York Times

• More than 600 writers and artists have signed an open letter “demand[ing] an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine.” | London Review of Books

• “I have always been bothered by memoir writers who are obviously making stuff up, but I am now also bothered by the possibility that we are all making it up, all the time.” Sallie Tisdale on memoir and memory. | Harper’s

• Michael Ledger-Lomas considers the field of literary biography and the search for wisdom in George Eliot. | The Point

Also on Lit Hub:

Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan on how the “Iron Horse” spelled doom for the American Buffalo • An open letter to the Frankfurt Book Fair in support of Adania Shibli • On the grim realities of the metaverse • In praise of fiction’s friendly ghosts • J. Ryan Stradal on memorializing his mother through fiction • Molly McGhee on unlearning the lessons of Dick Lit • Ye Chun reflects on learning to write in English without disappearing • Finding novelistic inspiration in museum wall labels • John Lee Clark traces the nomenclatures applied to the DeafBlind community over the centuries • The trap of fairytale victory endings in historical fiction • Yes, your cat really is talking to you • Hilary Mantel’s longtime editor reflects on a writer at the peak of her powers • Ritu Mukerji on the life of Ann Preston • How mass media made mass protest • Masha Udensiva-Brenner on the lives of Russian expats in Tbilisi • Michael O’Sullivan follows W.H. Auden across Europe • Ahmed Naji narrates his own obscenity trial • Dispatches from a sensory deprivation tank • On the cultural legacy of angels • Lessons from an art conservator’s biggest failure

]]> https://lithub.com/lit-hub-weekly-october-16-20-2023/feed/ 0 228466 https://lithub.com/lit-hub-daily-october-20-2023/ https://lithub.com/lit-hub-daily-october-20-2023/#respond Fri, 20 Oct 2023 10:30:53 +0000 https://lithub.com/?p=228463 TODAY: In 1955, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the final volume of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is published.  

• Ed Simon considers the cultural legacy of angels: “My suspicion is that there is a lot more leeway for those who believe in ghosts and specters, sprites and faeries, even demons, than there is to say that you believe in something as sentimental as angels.” | Lit Hub Religion

• “Satire dances on a knife’s edge between comedic commentary and complete disaster.” Eli Grober on the art of satire. | Lit Hub Craft

• “I began to see all of us who fail, destroy, and damage despite our best intentions.” Lessons from an art conservator’s biggest failure. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Teju Cole’s Tremor, Sly Stone’s Thank You, and Marie Ndiaye’s Vengeance is Mine all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• “We cannot succeed if we cannot imagine (and articulate) vivid alternatives to apocalypse.” Karen Russell looks for hope amid climate catastrophe. | Esquire

• Kristen Roupenian considers A Haunting on the Hill, Elizabeth Hand’s “authorized follow-up” to The Haunting of Hill House, and the strange work of resurrecting a dead writer. | The New Yorker

• “I have always been bothered by memoir writers who are obviously making stuff up, but I am now also bothered by the possibility that we are all making it up, all the time.” Sallie Tisdale on memoir and memory. | Harper’s

• Michael Ledger-Lomas considers the field of literary biography and the search for wisdom in George Eliot. | The Point

• “Her professional focus is on bringing complex, ambiguous stories to the page.” Lauren Cappelle profiles Marie NDiaye. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: On life during and after art school, from Lila Ash’s graphic memoir, Decodependence • A poem by Marisa Crawford • Read “The Endlings” by Tania James, from the last issue of Freeman’s

• “The ambition of the book is to tell the whole story of Israel/Palestine.” Nathan Thrall talks to Masha Gessen about his new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. | Lit Hub In Conversation

• “The fact that literature is not helpless is proven by the fact that it attracts power.” Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka on a lifetime of art and activism. | Lit Hub

• Fleeing the Kremlin: Masha Udensiva-Brenner on the lives of Russian expats in Tbilisi, the new Casablanca. | Lit Hub Politics

• What Catherine Chen is reading now and next, from The Classic of Mountain and Seas to Strange Writing. | Lit Hub Annotated Nightstand

• Journey into Audenworld: Michael O’Sullivan follows W.H. Auden across Europe. | Lit Hub Biography

• “The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smoldering, until it is shining off the page.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• Elissa Suh reviews literary fare from the New York Film Festival, including Poor Things, The Beast, and Foe. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• David Remnick talks to reporter Patricia Evangelista about her book Some People Need Killing, which chronicles the Duterte presidency and its extralegal drug wars in the Philippines. | The New Yorker

• Your local Barnes & Noble may be getting a makeover. | The New York Times

• More than 600 writers and artists have signed an open letter “demand[ing] an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine.” | London Review of Books

• “You can’t cure loneliness because you can’t cure the power of refusal and any entity worth being in a relationship with has the power to refuse, the power to render us lonely.” Daisy Alioto on AI and loneliness. | Dirt

• “I like to establish what the goal is for the person I’m writing about. What do they want from telling their story?” Naomi Skwarna and Rachel Kushner in conversation. | Hazlitt

• “Her poetry talks to us about us, not to herself.” Meghan O’Rourke on her mentor, Louise Glück. | The Yale Review

Also on Lit Hub: Ahmed Naji narrates his own obscenity trial • Dispatches from a sensory deprivation tank • Read from Anbara Salam’s latest novel, Hazardous Spirits

• “The Israeli Army can now call my mobile phone to inform me of its intention to bomb my house, but my tongue is struck dumb.” Adania Shibli on bombings in Ramallah. | Lit Hub Politics

• In the final installment of The Journey That Matters, a new series of video shorts on Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula reflects on balancing motherhood and her writing career with the help of her husband, Charles. | Lit Hub Biography

• John Freeman says goodbye to Freeman’s: “It can make you feel a bit gloomy, unless you accept that like New York City itself, literary magazines are by nature—most of them, not all—meant to be ephemeral.” | Lit Hub

• Yes, your cat really is talking to you (a scientist says so!). | Lit Hub Animals

• “The story of Hilary Mantel is scattered throughout her novels. But in her journalism and essays, a full and exhilarating self-portrait emerges.” Hilary Mantel’s longtime editor reflects on a writer at the peak of her powers. | Lit Hub

• Michelle Nijhuis considers how the film adaptation of Butcher’s Crossing betrays its brilliant source material. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• Diksha Basu on graduating from WebMD: “Everything isn’t a hop, skip, and click away from a death sentence.” | Lit Hub Health

• In the face of the rising tide of bans, Scholastic is taking the cowardly stance of allowing schools to opt out of providing diverse books at its bookfairs. | NPR

• “What there isn’t, and what there never is, is a genius every three months. This is something promoted by the publishing industry, and not just publishing, but every single walk of life you can imagine.” Sophie Vershbow interviews Fran Lebowitz. | Esquire

• Kevin Young, Elisa Gonzalez, and more writers remember Louise Glück. | The New Yorker

• A 21-year-old computer scientist used machine learning to read a 2,000-year-old scroll that was buried under volcanic ash in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Neat! | Vice

• Emily Zarevich considers Sylvia Plath’s fascination with bees. | JSTOR Daily

Also on Lit Hub: Ritu Mukerji on the life of Ann Preston • How mass media made mass protest • Read from Adam Thirlwell’s latest novel, The Future Future

• “They are closing out the space for a Palestinian voice.” An open letter to the Frankfurt Book Fair in support of Adania Shibli, from more than 350 writers, editors, and publishers. | Lit Hub

• “I don’t have time to write about the soul. / There are bodies to count.” Read a poem by Hala Alyan. | Lit Hub Poetry

• Here’s how you can help people in Gaza right now. | The Hub

• 24 new books to keep you company. | The Hub

• Molly McGhee on unlearning the lessons of Dick Lit: “I had misread the authors I had surrounded myself with, I realized. Or maybe it was everyone else who misread them.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• Linguistic belonging: Ye Chun reflects on learning to write in English without disappearing. | Lit Hub

• Finding novelistic inspiration in museum wall labels. | Lit Hub Art

• John Lee Clark traces the nomenclatures applied to the DeafBlind community over the centuries, and the importance of letting people self-identify. | Lit Hub

• Sophie Gilbert ponders Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl adaptations and what they tell viewers about both artists. | The Atlantic

• “The most difficult challenge in our lives is to face our contributions to the systems that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence.” Sarah Schulman on the Hamas-Israel War. | New York Magazine

• It is a truth universally acknowledged that an AI bot in possession of the collected works of Jane Austen, must be in want of engagement on Instagram. | Futurism

• Florence Hazrat considers the exclamation point! | The Millions

• Canadian authors including Yann Martel, Alix Ohlin, and Heather O’Neill weigh in on their books being used to train AI. | The Walrus

Also on Lit Hub: The trap of fairytale victory endings in historical fiction • Read from the illustrated adaptation of Watership Down • Read from Tan Twan Eng’s latest novel, The House of Doors

• Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns on how the “Iron Horse” spelled doom for the American Buffalo. | Lit Hub History

• “The shit in the metaverse is spilling over into the shit in the real world.” On the grim realities of the metaverse. | Lit Hub Technology

• “Nothing is lost in translation.” Kirmen Uribe on writing and dreaming in Basque, Spanish, English and life in between languages. | Lit Hub On Translation

• Pamela Newton reflects on Alexander Stille’s The Sullivanians and the narratives and realities of her childhood in an urban commune. | Lit Hub MemoirSins of our fathers: Lily Dunn reflects on the aftermath of writing a memoir about her dad and on new books by Safyia Sinclair and Noreen Masud. | Lit Hub Literary Criticism

• Poet and Nobel laureate Louise Glück has died at 80. | AP

• Joy Lanzendorfer on Lenore Kandel, whose “psychedelic sex poems” kicked off San Francisco’s longest obscenity trial. | The New Yorker

• “She is remapping where we believe we must look if we are to understand [American] history and the world it has created.” Imani Perry profiles Jesmyn Ward. | The New York Times Magazine

• Ex-hippies and proto-techies rejoice: you can now access the entire Whole Earth Catalog archive online. | WIRED

• “Ye’s vicissitudes trouble me in particular because I had a father once. He was brave and chaotic too. Awful and beautiful too. A workaholic full of ennui too.” Harmony Holiday on Kanye West. | The Paris Review

• Fehmida Zakeer explores the gastronomic verse of Kushajim, the 10th century polymath, poet, and master chef. | Atlas Obscura

Also on Lit Hub: Katharine Quarmby on fiction’s friendly ghosts • J. Ryan Stradal on memorializing his mother through fiction

• “What these readers are expressing is not so uncommon: the fear of indirect contact. They can’t bear to think that their beloved author has passed through the filter of some other being.” Todd Portnowitz on the translating the stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection. | Lit Hub On Translation
• “‘Ye olde’ is in fact a pseudo-archaic term; no one ever said ‘ye olde’ except in imitation of an imagined speech of the distant past.” Hana Videen on Chaucer, Hamlet, and the evolution of Middle and Old English. | Lit Hub History
• “Even when writing an escapist romance, Wharton is inescapably herself: A brilliantly funny cynic; a razor sharp observer of the mores of the very rich; a chronicler of bad behavior.” Jessie Gaynor on Edith Wharton’s pessimistic literary escape The Glimpses of the Moon. | Lit Hub Literary Criticism
• “I don’t know if my writing improved, but I did write differently after I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in early 2016.” Dan O’Brien on how to write a memoir while dying. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “What I think the Academy meant is that, across his forty-odd plays, his novels, his essays, and his children’s books, what is unsayable—the absolute depths of abandonment, shame, love, and grace—is felt without needing to be named, surpassing the mere arrangement of words on a page.” Merve Emre on newly crowned Nobel Prize laureate Jon Fosse and the art of what can’t be named. | The New Yorker
• “Last month the biggest drug raid in Irish history had been carried out by… William Butler Yeats.” Did you know the Irish navy has named its warships after Irish writers for the past decade? | The Irish Times, New York Times
• “I was once the sort of person who thought they knew Dracula, and might have spent my adult life without reading the novel until a close friend dropped some very suspect-sounding and yet enthralling literary gossip…” Alex Chee on Bram Stoker, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and finally reading a classic. | Guernica
• Esquire has dubbed Chain Gang All Stars author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah “one of the most exciting literary talents of this generation” in a profile of the National Book Award finalist. | Esquire
• “Your Uncle Roger writes doggerel verse like this by the yard and sends it out to you every Christmas. I point out that a chatbot replacing Uncle Roger might very well happen, but, dear published author, it is not yet very likely to replace you.” Margaret Atwood reviews a “Margaret Atwood” story by AI. | The Walrus
• Dan Sinykin traces the surprisingly short history of “literary fiction.” | The Nation
• Book banning is getting even stupider: “A public library system in Alabama flagged a children’s book as potentially ‘sexually explicit; because the author’s last name is ‘Gay.’” | NBC News
• Melvin L. Rogers revisits W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1926 symposium, “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?” | Lapham’s Quarterly
• The editor of Bad Form on the necessity of literary magazines in the face of financial struggles | The Guardian
• “She dared to speak out loud what others had experienced but were not yet ready to talk about.” Laima Vince recounts the experience of teaching writing to Ukrainian refugee women. | Arrowsmith Press
• “The only route to Utopia is illuminated by disobedience.” Rachel Vorona Cote on Oscar Wilde’s critical writing. | The Nation
• What are the best descriptions of loneliness in literature? Sophie Ratcliffe makes some suggestions that describe “a painful absence all the time.” | The Guardian
• The Indian government has charged Arundhati Roy with “offenses related to provocative speech and the promotion of enmity between different groups” over public comments she made 13 years ago about Kashmir. | The New York Times
• Steven Spielberg, David Zaslav, Liza Minnelli, Ava DuVernay and others pick the 100 best film books of all time. | Hollywood Reporter
• Read Myroslav Laiuk’s wartime poems, translated from Ukrainian by Ostap Kin and Kate Tsurkan. | The Dial

Also on Lit Hub:

Adam Dalva tries to profile Benjamín Labatut • Ann Patchett rereads Oscar Hijuelos • Paul Yoon in conversation with his wife, Laura van den Berg • Rumaan Alam wants you to read Helen Garner’s The Children’s Back, “a story about how life happens to all of us” • Aleksandar Hemon on endings • The Marvelettes on how they became Motown music legends • Why Sergey Gandlevsky’s Russian protest poems still matter now •Adam Thirlwell on Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed • David Mitchell on life in early-Medieval England the less-than-illustrious origins of the English crown • Alex Dos Santos on how horror helps us confront and understand our grief • All the ways Rebecca Clarren learned to write her book • Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the lost psychobiography of President Woodrow Wilson • Amanda Montei’s reading list of seven novels that explore consent and coercion • On the world’s most beautiful bird • Isa Arsén in praise of pulp fiction • Martin Goodman considers what it means to write about the Holocaust • Nobel Prize Laureate Katalin Karikó on her Hungarian childhood • Thrity Umrigar on fitting in in Americal • Dorothy Lasky on the power of horror  •Marlena Williams looks at Linda Blair’s infamous role The Exorcist