Lit Hub Weekly: August 14 – 18, 2017

• The 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel was awarded to N. K. Jemisin for The Obelisk Gate; other winners include Ursula K. Le Guin, Amal El-Mohtar, and Seanan McGuire. | The Hugo Awards
• An era really has ended: On Michiko Kakutani’s departure from the New York Times. | Vulture
• John Banville on the concluding volume of Reiner Stach’s Franz Kafka study, “one of the great literary biographies of our time—indeed, of any time.” | The New York Review of Books
• I just want to remember this forever: A short story by Garth Greenwell. | The New Yorker
• Exploring the hometown of August Wilson, “an artist who had an unwavering commitment to chronicling both the triumphs and the painful setbacks of African-Americans.” | The New York Times
• “For the first time that I can remember, I am politically troubled by a good novel doing exactly what it is that good, socially conscious novels traditionally do.” Jonathan Dee on the fate of the social novel in a time of global crisis. | Harper’s
• “What happens if I can learn to measure love’s effect, and this love, which feels so real, doesn’t register?” Melissa Febos investigates the musical qualities of the female orgasm. | The Believer
• “How can I, in good faith, condemn the boxer and not the violence that spawned that boxer?” Walter Mosley on boxing, Floyd Mayweather, and the rewarding of competitive violence. | ESPN
• Are you afraid / Of the country that exists outside of your cave?: “Hymn,” a new poem by Sherman Alexie. | Early Bird Books
• “Women clamored to participate from the moment the second Klan reappeared.” An excerpt from Linda Gordon’s The Second Coming of the KKK. | BuzzFeed Reader
• Against the Booker Prize: author and critic Amit Chaudhuri argues that “today there’s little intellectual or material investment in writers: literary prizes and shortlists are meant to sell books.” | The Guardian
• How Danzy Senna’s New People “chimes with and challenges the larger canon of works that take on multiracial identity,” from Jean Toomer to Fran Ross. | The Baffler
• The reality of the filth feels honest and upsetting: Jac Jemc on finding inspiration in haunted houses and the photography of Roger Ballen. | Work in Progress
• Two longtime employees at Denver’s Tattered Cover Bookstore have opened a live-in library in a formerly abandoned Colorado Ranch. | National Trust for Historic Preservation
• Mine was to be no typical ceremony: An excerpt from Jarett Kobek’s novel The Future Won’t Be Long. | n+1
• “These little endorsements can reach a much larger audience.” Why book publicists are chasing the celebrity social media bump from famous readers like Reese Witherspoon and Emma Roberts. | T Magazine

Also on Lit Hub: 

Back in 1970, The New York Times said Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was “so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” · The Washington Post calls Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire “a haunting novel, full of dazzling moments” · “Midnight’s Children burgeons with life, with exuberance and fantasy”: Three of the first reviews of Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning epic · A 1985 review of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s novel of Nazi resistance, If Not Now, When? · “His sentences read like Hemingway stripped of his machismo”: The Minneapolis Star Tribune on Paul Yoon’s short story collection, The Mountain · Margaret Atwood on phallus worship and Updike’s Bad Witches · Haunted houses, battling brothers, and more: the best-reviewed books of the week