Lit Hub Weekly: April 2 – 6, 2018

• “She was and is my favorite author, a lame epithet for someone whose fiction has caused my bones to blossom.” Karen Russell on Joy Williams and her recently reissued second novel, The Changeling. | The New Yorker
• No other walk on Earth made sense to me, or my rage: Rahawa Haile on walking from Selma to Montgomery after the election. | BuzzFeed Books
• On the nationalist origins of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, which was created “with the express purpose of creating a single definition of American English.” | The Paris Review
• “Where can we go if King is not only what we should aspire to be, but King is all that we are allowed to become?” Mychal Denzel Smith on the trouble with our collective memory of Martin Luther King. | The Atlantic
• “One, I realized literally NO ONE cares if I give up on a book except me. Two, I realized that I’m going to die.” Why it’s okay (really!) to stop reading mediocre books. | Electric Literature
• “They’d heard that she’d written a paper on the psychology of dying. She hadn’t, but she took their mistake as a sign.” How Elisabeth Kübler-Ross became our preeminent grief guru. | New York Review of Books
• Roxane Gay is curating a pop-up magazine in which twenty-four writers—including Matthew Salesses, Randa Jarrar, Carmen Maria Machado, Terese Mailhot, and Gabrielle Bellot—will answer the question “what does it mean to live in an unruly body?” | Medium
• Libraries reflect the history of how we express knowledge: on library design, and the often contentious history of the librarian-architect dynamic. | Triple Canopy
• The Man Booker International prize has come under fire for changing nominee Wu Ming-Yi’s listed nationality from “Taiwan” to “Taiwain, China” after being pressured by Beijing. | The Guardian
• “The problem for Wood today is that politics . . .  have returned to the contemporary novel with little warning, in ways he could hardly have anticipated.” On the criticism of James Wood, and his new novel Upstate. | The Times Literary Supplement
• “From falling in love for the first time to navigating friendships to worrying about their bodies, she portrays young women’s lives, struggles, thoughts, and fears with the sincerity and care that they deserve.” On the radical fiction of Judy Blume. | Broadly
• “Elevated to center stage, at the height of expectation and in full view of the audience, she is erased from view.” On the history of the “poetess.” | JSTOR
• LISA COHEN, just 17. Not the best-looking girl in her class but definitely in the top five: How 50 female characters in film were described in their screenplays. | Vulture
• Emily Nemens has been appointed as the new editor of The Paris Review, the seventh in its 65-year history. | The Paris Review
• One of the teenagers sentenced to read books from a designated list after vandalizing a historic black schoolhouse last year reflects on what he’s learned, while the chosen authors explain what impact they hope their work has had. | The New York Times

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