Lit Hub Weekly: August 1-5, 2022

• Ella Risbridger muses on the pain-writing-money trifecta, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, and memoir as fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• Lulu Miller in praise of “the uncrushable beetle.” | Lit Hub Nature

• How Kiki de Montparnasse, a muse with a mind of her own, “essentially invented the idea of making an art out of being yourself.” | Lit Hub Biography

• Jana Casale considers the particular agony of visiting a bookstore as a debut author. | Lit Hub Writing Life

• New titles from Mohsin Hamid, Anthony Marra, Emmanuel Carrère, and Tess Gunty all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• The antitrust trial that will decide whether Penguin Random House can acquire Simon & Schuster began this week: here’s a rundown of why it’s important. | The New York Times

• “I don’t think I have got my head round the import of what is going on. Yet I do know that this war has a significance beyond most stories I’ve reported.” Lindsey Hilsum shares her letters home from Ukraine during the first weeks of the invasion. | Granta

• A look at how The Master and Margarita “emerged intact from the calamitous flame of Soviet censorship.” | JSTOR Daily

• “I have always viewed writing fiction as moral work, but never before had it felt so urgent.” Akhil Sharma on revising his first published novel. | The New Yorker

• “Our impulse to sort one another into like-me and not-like-me comes at the worst possible moment in time.” Mohsin Hamid on the perils of an increasingly polarized world. | The Guardian

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• “I can’t write today. All I can do is masturbate while listening to Monchy & Alexandra.” Andrea Abreu on internet searches and intimacy. | Astra Magazine

• “What I want to tell you is as delicate as life itself. And I want to use the delicacy that exists inside me along with the peasant coarseness that is my saving grace.” Read selections from Clarice Lispector’s long-running Saturday newspaper column. | The Paris Review

• Rhian Sasseen considers Izumi Suzuki’s “brash, clever, odd works of science fiction, propelled by an irreverent kind of up yours! energy.” | The Baffler

• Look inside librarian Sharon McKellar’s collection of the many items people leave behind in returned library books. | NPR

• “The first time I saw the world end I was eight years old.” Alyssa Harad reckons with life in the middle of a climate crisis. | Kenyon Review

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• Moira Donegan on reading Susan Faludi’s Backlash in a post-Roe world. | Men Yell at Me

• “Her oeuvre asks a single question, over and over and over: do you love me?” Dan Sinykin considers the career of Danielle Steel. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Elaine Castillo recommends ten overlooked novels. | Publishers Weekly

• “A life of work and feeling, from which art and love are created, is in the context of its daily recording actually quite ordinary.” Apoorva Tadepalli on the diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay. | The Nation

• “The subversive potential of so many works derided as trash is that they focus on female interiority, female pleasure, female aspiration.” Sophie Gilbert considers the radicalism of romance novels. | The Atlantic

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Also on Lit Hub:

Mary Ruefle: “I am not ashamed to take what joy I can in writing.” • Aimee Bender on stones as secret-keepers • Joseph Osmundson considers the visual side of virology • Michelle Tea on embracing (unconventional) motherhood • Searching for the ghosts that haunted Malcolm Lowry • Jillian Medoff on breaking up with her literary agent • Lynne Tillman on watching a mother’s final days • What conventional wisdom gets wrong about cancer • Jenny Bhatt considers the politics of translation • To write fiction with a psychotherapist’s mind • Are contemporary novels that don’t acknowledge the pandemic just alt-history? • E.B. Bartels on the disenfranchised grief of losing a pet • Bill Glose on drawing from his own life to write stories of war • Looking at the long tradition of humans swallowing bugs in fiction • What’s the point of a jellyfish? • Emma Seckle on the Celtic legend of an airborne fairy • Susan Coll on falling in love with (and at) a bookstore • 18th-century Vienna through the eyes of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu • Adam Langer on high school rumors and storytelling • On the Muslim women who fought for a forbidden love: the game of futsal • Before the wedding, divulging family secrets • Chrysta Bilton tells the story of her birth (with a very brief appearance from her father)