Lit Hub Weekly: April 22 - 26, 2019

• “A thriller is only as good as its villain, and the bad guys here have an undeniable panache.” Laura Miller reviews the Mueller Report (as literature). | Slate
• A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows how The Tale of Genji, the 11th-century masterpiece from Japan, has been one of the world’s most enduring literary hits. | The New Yorker
• For those of you who stan the scientists who photographed the black hole (so basically everybody, right?), here’s what they like to read. | The Paris Review
• “What if a streamlined suitcase is the missing link, the unheralded key to writing sentences like skate blades?” Rachel Syme on the undeniable allure of writers’ daily routines. | Bookforum
• From Morgan Parker to Franny Choi: all the poetry you should be reading right now, according to writers. | O
• “When we have 10 stories, there are maybe 10,000 stories that we will never know.” The power of translating stories of the Armenian diaspora. | Los Angeles Times
• “Like Greek tragedies, these tell-alls each end the same way, with the author being exiled.” The dubious lessons of four Trump tell-alls. | Vice
• Do the climate catastrophe books of Nathaniel Rich and David Wallace-Wells go far enough in condemning fossil fuel industry lobbyists? Wen Stephenson makes a case. | The Baffler
• “The novelist has to make the way by going.” Even when she’s going for 17 years. Elizabeth Cook on the merits of writing slowly. | Granta
• Is the energy and lyricism of early 20th-century sports columns a “lost” art? | The Atlantic
• “When my wife died, my life was thrown out of time. My past didn’t seem to connect to my present.” Matthew Salesses on grief, memory, and the feeling of time. | Longreads
• Maggie Doherty does a deep dive into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s history of institutional sexism, entitled male instructors, and feminist resistance. | The New Republic
• “What would happen, I wondered, if we just kept mushing?” Blair Braverman on the time she ran the Iditarod. | Outside
• “I could not imagine the complete devastation of motherhood”: Kate Zambreno and Sarah Manguso on writing postpartum. | The Paris Review
• Writers from around the world, including Ma Jian, Jennifer Clement, and Ahmed Naji, will discuss “growing economic inequality, social injustice, political oppression, and eroding freedoms” at the PEN America World Voices Festival. | PEN

Also on Lit Hub:

Because every day is Earth Day: 365 books to start your climate change library (the classics, the science, fiction and poetry, politics, pathologies, philosophy) · Bill McKibben on our new climate reality • Mireille Juchau’s notes toward a new Golden Record of humanity • Andrew Ervin on Robert Macfarlane, Sami folktales, and what we risk losing in the Arctic • A professional beekeeper shares some tips for preventing the insect apocalypse • Five climate change audiobooks to listen to this spring • Read Walt Whitman’s thoughts on sex • Isabella Hammad on six great books of correspondence • On editing Oliver Sacks after he was gone • Can you save a dying Italian town with the art of storytelling? • How John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, revealed the horrors of the atomic bomb to the US • A wunderkind reflects on rejection and persistence • On the ongoing obsession with Shakespeare’s true identity, and his afterlife agnosticism •  Ian McEwan on Bach, Philip Roth and living an episodic life • Amy Tan reflects on 30 years since The Joy Luck Club • Going deep into the J.P. Donleavy archives • Wandering the Arctic Circle (on Google Maps) for a novel • Moving back to West Virginia, in fiction and in life: Mesha Maren returns home in Sugar Run • The improbable history of baseball’s weirdest pitch • Saying goodbye to a beloved local bookstore • The lessons of recording a half-century’s worth of reading • Reading Robinson Crusoe, 300 years on • A profile of Deborah Landau • Dreaming of being a writer when you’ve never actually met one • Gabrielle Bellot on the virtuosic shame of Giovanni’s Room • On early 20th-century America’s unhealthy fixation with “hygiene” • Rules for writing. . . an entire novel in ten days •  Amanda Leduc on disability, Captain Marvel, and fantasies of the perfectable body • Emily Oster talks to Pamela Druckerman about her “parenting book for economists” • William Faulkner’s grudging, misogynistic fan letter to Anita Loos • On the importance of getting the science right in your novel • On the literary culture of Arctic expeditions

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

Congrats to the 2019 Edgar Winners! • Edgar Award nominees weigh in on the state of the genre, parts 1 and 2  •  Reed Farrel Coleman on how TV series Bosch captured the stark poetry of Michael Connelly’s noir opus • Bridget Collins on the power of stories, to help and to harm •  Adi Tantimedh on the art of the crime comedy • Paul Abbott on the first 10 years of Ed McBain’s 87^th Precinct series • Next up in Crime and the City: Kingston, Jamaica • Sally Hepworth rounds up 8 novels featuring dysfunctional families • Lisa Levy scours the last two decades of crime fiction in search of The Great Hipster Mystery • A beginner’s guide to locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, from Gigi Pandian