Lit Hub Daily: April 18, 2019

• “Once I translated the dramatic arc to a wave, I began to think that energy in narrative might also flow in smaller waves…” Jane Alison on Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. | Lit Hub
• What Oliver Sacks’ obsession with weightlifting can tell us about his writing. | Lit Hub
• “Tragedy gives voice to the complex relations between freedom and necessity that define our being.” Simon Critchley on how we collude in our calamity. | Lit Hub
• “We can’t unhappen it.” Rachel Cline on unearthing a #MeToo story while revising her novel. | Lit Hub
• A reading list of fiction about fact: Michael Cunningham, George Saunders, and other “literary grave robbers.” | Lit Hub
• “In short, they studied the world without abandoning the moral geography of America.” On the cautionary patriotism of the Presidents Adams. | Lit Hub
• Mariah Fredericks on the many parallels between crimes in the Gilded Age and in contemporary America. | CrimeReads
• Ian McEwan’s retro-futurism, Sally Rooney’s intellectual romance, Laila Lalami’s timely immigrant saga, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise: confusing bait-and switch OR a book to make the taut strings in your chest zing? | Book Marks
• In France, five different editions of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame have become bestsellers following the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral. | The Guardian
• Safe deposit boxes containing unpublished writings by Franz Kafka may soon be unlocked following a decade-long legal battle. | San Antonio Express News
• “[Y]ou change the conditions under which violence prevailed.” Rachel Kushner profiles prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. | The New York Times Magazine
• Marlon James, Tara Westover, and Lynn Nottage are three of the year’s most influential people, along with the creators of Juul. | TIME
• The Modern Library will launch a new trade paperback series dedicated to classics written by women “who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.” | Publishers Weekly
• “There is no better place to look for nuanced critical engagement with Walt Whitman’s complicated legacy than in the work of black intellectuals.” Talking back to Walt Whitman, at 200. | JSTOR
• Aminatta Forna and Sarah Moss are among those shortlisted for this year’s RSL Ondaatje Prize. | The Bookseller

Also on Lit Hub: On Fiction/Non/Fiction, Emily Raboteau and Omar El Akkad discuss telling the stories of climate change • Culture, Too: the conference bringing critics of color together • Rachel Barenbaum and Christopher Castellani in conversation • Read from Pierre Jarawan’s debut novel, The Storyteller