Lit Hub Weekly: August 15-19, 2022

TODAY: In 1881, British-born American poet Edgar Albert Guest is born.  

• Dana Milbank considers the Republican Party’s embrace of political violence before January 6th—including Sarah Palin’s call to arms and crosshairs image over Gabby Giffords’s district. | Lit Hub Politics

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• “I am a performer and a monk.” Sidik Fofano on being a shy debut author. | Lit Hub Writing Life

• Miriam Parker has notes for Nora Ephron and When Harry Met Sally’s Sally Albright, about the “big dead end” of turning 40. | Lit Hub Film & TV

• New titles from Beth Macy, Édouard Louis, and Sidik Fofana all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• The best nonfiction crime books of the year (so far). | CrimeReads

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• “The banning of books is not a figurative matter in contemporary America. It’s not like the censorship of another time, place, or regime; it’s the censorship we actually have.” Aaron R. Hanlon on the false equivalency between the attack on Salman Rushdie and “cancel culture.” | The New Republic

• “Is publishing about art or commerce? The answer, of course, is ‘Both’—as with any creative business—but watching each side wrestle with that ambiguity has been instructive.” Katy Waldman on the trial that’s gripped the book world. | The New Yorker

• Sarah Shaffi breaks down the past, present, and future of literary festivals, along with what organizers say needs to change. | The Guardian

• “The gaps that open within and between adaptations of his work allows for readers to enter and move rather freely.” Ashley Domingo Hendricks considers the literal and metaphorical gutters in Neil Gaiman’s books. | JSTOR Daily

• Leanne Ogasawara on re-envisioning the MFA workshop: “It is not that I think we should scrap existing syllabi, but rather that we must make room for other storytelling traditions in these programs.” | The Millions

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• “All illness, including mental illness, is exacerbated by a lack of community, by feeling alone.” Alejandro Varela talks to Nicole Chung about being a writer with anxiety. | The Atlantic

• Nadia Owusu contemplates abortion and the idea of personhood. | Guernica

• Want to read the Game of Thrones series from the beginning? Adam Morgan shows you where to start. | Esquire

• What should you read next? Flowcharts from a bookseller at A Room of One’s Own (Madison, WI) can help the overwhelmed reader. | The New York Times

• Lili Anolik explores the fraught (and generative) friendship between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. | Vanity Fair

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• Lisa Bubert recommends a few writer profiles you need to read right now: “Give me the weird tics, the turns of phrase, the strange beginnings. Give me the writer in their natural habitat.” | Longreads

• Lynne Feeley explores the growing body of eco-fiction. | The Nation

• What defines the millennial generation? Sarah Wasserman on how several authors address the question. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Douglas Preston, president of the Authors Guild, discusses the danger of consolidation in the publishing industry. | Los Angeles Times

• Jennifer Wilson considers Pushkin’s conception of his Blackness, through the lens of his unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather. | NYRB

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Also on Lit Hub:

Mike Gayle on sartorial optimism • Matthew Cappucci on a life of storm chasing • Vishwesh Bhatt on what it means to be a Southern chef as an Indian immigrant • Olaf Olafsson knows when to stop writing • Anna DeForest on the work of death and dying • How psychoanalysis and clown school help reveal deep-seated human truths • In which the galaxy gets a kick out of humans’ creation myths • Reflections on Ulysses, Brexit, and the Jewish community in Dublin • Dur e Aziz Amna in praise of intertextuality • Margot Atwell on what the PRH trial has revealed about indie publishers • Brandon Shimoda on reading stories of Japanese American incarceration to his young daughter • What a new Beowulf translation says about extinction • Courtney Martin on the many ways of asking the school question • Sadie Jones on writing about childhood • On Edie Sedgwick’s first movies with Andy Warhol • Finding healing at Paris’s Shakespeare and Company • Rebecca Woolf on the lies that make up a marriage • When Rick James fought to get Black artists on MTV

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