Lit Hub Weekly: April 29 - May 3, 2024

• Aarathi Prasad on how silk helped Genghis Khan conquer a continent. | Lit Hub History
• “Shortly after 2:30, on the morning of Tuesday, April 30, one thousand New York City policemen marched onto the campus in military formation.” This isn’t the first time students have occupied Hamilton Hall. Charles Kaiser on the 1968 protests at Columbia. | Lit Hub Politics
• “I was aspiring to a romantic ideal that no one more than he represented.” Jason K. Friedman on loving Cormac McCarthy’s early work. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “There’s always, I think, a fundamental mystery to other people.” Nicole Chung talks to Rachel Khong about the power and potential of not knowing. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Heidi Seaborn on three new Agnes Martin-inspired poetry collections by Lauren Camp, Victoria Chang and Brian Teare. | Adroit Journal
• Are we reading wrong? Maybe. | The Atlantic
• Prepare yourself. A deep dive into the most essential works of Joan Didion. | The New York Times
• On gender, otherness, and fear. Parul Sehgal profiles Judith Butler. | The New Yorker
• “That silence is so incredibly important to think about. Silence shapes what is said.” An interview with Claire Jiménez. | Nashville Review
• Chinua Achebe, Joy Harjo, Ernest Gains, Ntozake Shange, and more. How the short-lived Yardbird Reader made space for a wider lens in literature. | JSTOR Daily
• On James Baldwin’s cinematic aspirations. | The Guardian
• “To write all day long without revising until you reach the end of a story produces an obscene quantity of books.” Alejandro Chacoff profiles César Aira (trans. By Jessica Sequiera). | The Dial
• “They didn’t want law and order, they wanted revenge.” On universities, police administration, and what we can learn from Stop Cop City. | n+1
• Who’s stealing all those rare editions of Pushkin from libraries around Europe? Is it you? If so, quit it. | The New York Times
• A conversation with Eileen Myles, through the lens of Chelsea Girls: “You know, I talk to people in my head all day long. There are a lot of people in there.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “No two of us were exactly alike. To meet one autistic person was to have met one autistic person.” Steve Edwards explores how an autism diagnosis altered his relationship to his writing. | The Yale Review
• “They speak still for those whose treatment fails, and those for whom treatment is neither available nor affordable.” Kay Redfield Jamison on personal accounts of depression and mania, from Lord Byron to Anne Sexton. | The MIT Press Reader
• John Guillory considers the future of literary criticism: “I wanted to show ultimately that there was something odd, something anomalous about this discipline of literary criticism…” | Public Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Natalie Foster on building a better America • Did Jane Austen like music? And why should we care? • Marc Berley on editing the work of Gordon Lish • The best book covers of April • Ballet’s long history of anti-Blackness • Shana Novak talks to Gloria Steinem about her library • The most anticipated literary film and TV coming to streaming this month • New sci-fi and fantasy books are for May • Caroline Carlson recommends new children’s books • Khadijah Queen on intimacy, self-care, and the asexual spectrum • Are you the literary asshole if you don’t want to talk to your coworker about their writing? • J.G. Ballard’s “The Garden of Time,” the story that inspired this year’s Met Gala • Angela Garcia on Mexico City’s illegal detox centers • New poetry from Catherine Barnett, Jeremy Michael Clark, Ann Jäderlund, and more • a Taxonomy of literary Sad Rich Girls (SRGs) • Tobias Buck on collective complicity and transitional justice in post-war Germany • The changing face of nature and climate narratives • The best audiobooks of April