Lit Hub Daily: September 20, 2019

TODAY: In 1939, Jean-Paul Sartre is conscripted into the French Army as a meteorologist.

• Heroes and (offline) trolls: Neil Gaiman introduces the spellbinding folktales of Norway. | Lit Hub
• “You can’t disentangle blackness and California.” Ismail Muhammad walks with the ghosts of black Los Angeles. | Lit Hub
• Are animals basically…millennials? On “extended parental care” in the human and animal realms. | Lit Hub
• “The overuse of medical services represents one of the greatest public health issues of the modern world.” On one of the (many) problems with industrializing health care. | Lit Hub
• On the final day of our Covering Climate Now series: Rosa Boshier on nostalgia and the environment in diasporic literature. | Lit Hub
• The problem of Germany’s post-war internal refugees: On the so-called “expellees” of Eastern Europe. | Lit Hub
• Unsurprisingly, the reality of post-Chernobyl life in Ukraine was more complicated than the HBO series let on. | Lit Hub
• Reckoning with the slave empires of World War II: James Walvin on the forced labor of concentration camps and Gulags. | Lit Hub
• Here’s the Nonfiction Longlist for the 2019 National Book Awards. | The Hub
• New titles from Jacqueline Woodson, Kevin Barry, and Rachel Cusk all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• Poetry, “sex magic,” and a $3 million Las Vegas heist. Jonathan Lee on Heather Tallchief, who committed the perfect crime and vanished without a trace. | CrimeReads
• The German jury for the Nelly Sachs Award, named after a Jewish writer and refugee who fled the Nazis, has rescinded the prize from author Kamila Shamsie over her support of the Palestinian BDS campaign. | Al Jazeera
• A previously unknown (and incomplete) novel by Françoise Sagan, who satirized the lives of the mid-20th century Parisian bourgeoisie, is causing excitement in the hectic French publishing season. | France 24
• Why some people become lifelong readers—hint: it has to do with their childhoods. | The Atlantic
• The major narrator of The Testaments is Aunt Lydia—but is the novel too sympathetic toward “Gilead’s misogynistic female enabler”? | The Nation
• Residents of a Colorado city are trying to save local journalism, with their library’s help. | NPR
• “Every time I read a book as a kid where I didn’t see myself, I was like, you know, ‘[expletive] this!’” Jacqueline Woodson on representation in publishing. | The New York Times
• “As with any extensive psychoanalysis, the interpretation begins to reflect more upon the analyst than the patient.” Patrick Nathan on reading Benjamin Moser’s Sontag. | Longreads

Also on Lit Hub: Is the age of automation the new Industrial Revolution?: Carl Benedikt Frey talks to Andrew Frey on Keen On • In advance of Banned Books Week, Mitchell Kaplan talks to ABA’s David Grogan and Sydney Jarrard on The Literary Life • On Jean-Martin Charcot, dark star of 19th-century neurology, who thought he could define madness • Vanishing bees should not be the new normal • Read an excerpt from Heddi Goodrich’s debut novel, Lost in the Spanish Quarter.

 

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