Lit Hub Weekly: April 9 - 13, 2018

• “Racial inequity in cookbooks has a large impact on the broader food community . . . It means the food world continues to not accurately reflect the actual world.” Julia Turshen on the need for diverse cookbooks. | Eater
• A rare interview with the infamously reclusive Eve Babitz (who answered questions via e-mail). | Interview
• “I had to lose almost everything and then some. And then some. Before I finally put out my hand.” Junot Díaz on confronting his childhood trauma. | The New Yorker
• “The only way to get people seeing us not as a monolith is to have more of our stories out there.” On diversity in publishing and a new wave of Asian American YA novelists. | Entertainment Weekly
• “Most of the time, no one can tell I’m in pain by looking at me.” Nafissa Thompson-Spires on writing with a chronic illness. | The Paris Review
• “Read Georgia O’Keeffe’s letters and say the name Stieglitz hatefully to yourself as you piss.” Some very Patricia Lockwood advice about how to write right now. | Tin House
• To read Williams is to move dazed between the mundane and the profound: On Joy Williams’s The Changeling, which “overwhelmed its first critics in 1978.” | The Baffler
• One year before she published Geek Love (and became a “cult” figure in her own right), Katherine Dunn interviewed Rajneeshpuram’s erstwhile spokesperson Ma Anand Sheela on the cusp of her release from prison. | Willamette Week
• “We do a lot of sort-of-joking-but-not-really talking about the end times.” Carmen Maria Machado on her love- and anxiety-filled marriage. | The New York Times
• “I felt an imperative, if you will, to use the book as a way to more deeply understand him.” Peter Mathiessen’s son on recreating the journey of The Snow Leopard 40 years later. | The Guardian
• 30 books to look forward to this summer, if it ever arrives. | Elle
• Terese Marie Mailhot, Meredith Talusan, Ijeoma Oluo, Kathryn Belden, and Kima Jones discuss diversity in publishing and what it means to navigate the industry as a woman of color. | BuzzFeed Reader
• “It’s hard to imagine two more polar opposites than Trump and Comey.” Michiko Kakutani returns to the Times review desk for James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty. | The New York Times
• How Lisa Halliday’s debut novel Asymmetry quietly became a literary phenomenon—or at least “the song of the summer.” | The New Yorker
• “It’s been said you could see it as appropriate, but it is not in a very fitting state for him.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s remains have been discovered in a wine cellar (TGIF?). | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: 

Testing ourselves to death: why Barbara Ehrenreich is giving up on the endless pursuits of preventative medicine • Gregory Pardlo on form, his father, and not writing a book about race (and how to pretend you’ve read a book you haven’t) • Gay. Muslim. Refugee. Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of Kemalemir Frashto, and trying to make a life in Trump’s America • Surviving the ordinary: why we need memoirs of regular lives • Not so great after all? One hundred one-star Amazon reviews of The Great Gatsby • Jessica Friedmann on blood, birth, and the talismanic power of red lipstick • 5 writers, 7 questions, no wrong answers: Leslie Jamison, Sloane Crosley and more take the Lit Hub author questionnaire • What if the lefty hoaxers are right? William T. Vollmann investigates climate change denial and the end of the world as we know it • Madeline Miller on restoring power to the women of ancient myth • Dear Book Therapist: Rosalie Knecht has the literary prescription for someone who seems to have lost it all • Listen, grammar pedants, enough: the English is NOT LOGICAL • Madelaine Lucas takes a road trip to Texas to spend time with Sam Shepard’s notebooks • A look at Edward Gorey’s book covers for Kafka, Dickens, Conrad and more (and a peek inside his Massachusetts home, while we’re at it) • Michelle Dean on the problem with “speaking for women” and the abstractions of contemporary feminism

Best of Book Marks:

There Is Always Another Side: A look back at Jean Rhys’ postcolonial masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea • 5 Books Making News This Week: Greek Myths and Sharp Wits • This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Kathleen Rooney on feminist espionage, cult horror novels, and wine shelf-talkers • Barbara Kingsolver on Richard Powers, Ron Charles on a novel about gun violence, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week • From Circe to Selfie, Kentucky noir to Kubrickian Sci-Fi, it’s the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

New on CrimeReads:

Shelley Puhak’s portrait of a library, a murder, and shattered illusions • In Tehran, writing noir is a political act • A family of writers with a passion for 1970s conspiracy thrillers • Why we should all be reading gross crime fiction • An author’s long obsession with her tennis coach, a notorious predator • David Peace’s working class alternative histories make a claim for greatness • A literary tour through Venice, city of masks and mysteries • 10 great clerical sleuths: priests, rabbis, reverends, nuns, monks, and more