Lit Hub Weekly: April 16 - 20, 2018

• “When you talk about certain lives—the lives of people subjected to domination—you have to justify why you do it.” In conversation with Édouard Louis and Zadie Smith. | Document Journal
• “If life is everywhere, the labor of feeling is boundless. How to contain it?” Rivka Galchen on temporality and reality in the work of Bruno Schulz. | Full Stop
• From The Monk of Mokha to Milk!, the most-anticipated food books of the spring. | Eater
• Susan Orlean’s next book, forthcoming this October, will investigate the case of the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library fire, which damaged or destroyed more than a million books. | Entertainment Weekly
• From Unnamed Press to Lil’ Libros, how small independent presses are turning LA into a book town. | LA Magazine
• “Contrary to liberal optimism, war, not peace, drove the development of modern capitalism.” A new work of history analyzes the role of guns in the making of the Industrial Revolution. | The New Republic
• Since January, every New York Times bestseller has been about Donald Trump—a trend that’s sure to continue with the release of James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty. | CNN
• “Find My Friends rewards a groundwork of trust that’s already laid, magnifying what we know to be true about the people we love through the changes in place that express it.” Kathleen Alcott on the surprising poignancy of an app that (consensually) tracks your friends’ locations. | The New York Times Magazine
• B.A. Van Sise’s creative portraits of contemporary poets, from Rita Dove to Jane Hirshfield. | BuzzFeed
• To lament the fact of your lamentations in English, English being your first defeat: A poem by Solmaz Sharif. | Poetry Foundation
• “Can language even bear the weight of this mess of our lives? Is our project as writers even . . . possible?” Jhumpa Lahiri on translating the novels of Domenico Starnone (aka Elena Ferrante’s husband). | The Paris Review
• Josephine Livingstone on Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer and “the way hip hop has compromised the distinction between music and literature.” | New Republic
• “What does it mean to be a ‘local author’ in Hawaii, this distinct nation encased within a state?” Hawaiian authors on the island’s literature and literary community. | Catapult
• “We are so vulnerable when we open ourselves up to literature. We’re reminded of these real parts of ourselves.” Tracy K. Smith and Jacqueline Woodson in conversation. | The New York Times
• A Farewell to Arms, Catch-22, The Alchemist, and other books you really don’t have to read (and what to read instead). | GQ

Also on Literary Hub:

All the novels I almost wrote: brand new Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer looks back at what might have been… and sighs with relief • Rebecca Solnit: Whose story (and country) is this? • Pola Oloixarac: Why I don’t write about the women in my family • In praise of near-impossible-to-translate doorstopper novels, from Alfred Doblin to Olga Tokarczuk and more • “Intuition is everything.” And other bits of writing advice from Gabriel Garcia Marquez • Sofija Stefanovic goes undercover at the Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Pageant in Melbourne • Form vs. content, the eternal conversation: John Keene on the elements of literary style • Kristen Arnett suggests some essential DIY library tricks in a time of dwindling budgets • Let us look back at the time Kathy Acker interviewed the Spice Girls and Ginger Spice said: “Money makes the world what it is… a world infested with evil” • From Alexander Chee to Leslie Jamison, Larissa Pham on the life-affirming generosity of the writer’s memoir • In Sarajevo, Dan Sheehan visits a museum dedicated to the memory of childhoods disrupted by war • So, who’s actually funny in the age of Trump? Sloane Crosley and Alexandra Petri on our Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast • From Ishiguro to Faludi to Koestler, 12 books that are guaranteed to make you cry (even if, like us, you are just a little bit dead inside) • The meanest things Vladimir Nabokov has ever said about other writers • It’s never “too soon” for art (or politics) about societal trauma: Tom McAllister on writing about a school shooting and Dava Sobel looks at the life and writing of Marjory Stoneman Douglas (who would have approved of the walk-outs) • Here is your 4/20 content: Why does DaVinci’s Jesus look so… stoned? • In honor of Earth Day, ten trailblazing environmental books, and a look at the literary brilliance of Rachel Carson

Best of Book Marks:

As the literary world waited to see who would claim the 2018 award, we took a look back at every Pulitzer Prize for fiction winner of the 21st century • 5 Books Making News This Week: A Modern Macbeth and Musings on Manhood • This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Washington Post Book World editor Ron Charles on the elegant wit of Sense and Sensibility and the need for more readers • Michiko Kakutani returns to the NYT books desk to write about James Comey’s memoir and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week • New titles from Barbara Ehrenreich, John Edgar Wideman, Gregory Pardlo, and more all feature among our Best Reviewed Books of the Week

New on CrimeReads:

Celebrate 4/20 with 17 marijuana-laced mysteries, from The Savage Detectives to Pineapple Express • 8 mysteries for the fan of puzzles, ciphers, and codes • Measuring romantic partners against literary obsessions, and what happens when your dating pool is limited to Sherlock Holmes experts •  Why cults are the one thing Hannah Mary McKinnon will never write about • Brad Parks reports on the state of the thriller in the age of Trump • Sara Shepard’s list of 8 thrillers nested inside thrillers • The critic re-solving the most famous cases in classic detective fiction • The woman who cleans up after death: a day with a trauma cleaner • 17 modern classics of addiction and yearning, from Jerry Stahl to Sara Gran • 26 crime writing poets, from Edgar Allan Poe to Charles Willeford •  Why we feel compelled to read about missing girls, and 7 novels that delicately engage with a parent’s worst fear