Lit Hub Weekly: August 16 - 20

• Brian Castleberry contemplates the role of fiction in America’s “struggle over reality and power.” | Lit Hub

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• A deep dive into the life and career of an enigmatic football (read: soccer) genius Lionel Messi. | Lit Hub Sports

• “Gardner may believe a classic work like Beowulf to be an example of true moral art. But the falseness Grendel detects in the epic poem is real, and impossible to ignore.” How John Gardner’s finest novel rebels against his own ideas. | Lit Hub

• Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Velvet Was the Night, Jaime Cortez’s Gordo, and Billie Jean King’s All In all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• James Lee Burke on the West, corporate exploitation, and the plot to dumb down America. | CrimeReads

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• Viet Thanh Nguyen on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and America’s moral responsibility to refugees. | The New York Times

• “‘Let people enjoy things’ is essentially the twitchy fear of ‘cancel culture,’ translated over into the world of taste.” B.D. McClay considers the critics of criticism. | Gawker

• How should we think about posthumous art? | JSTOR Daily 

• “You created a love out of your own longing and gave it away.” Deesha Philyaw on trying to write about love. | Split Lip

• Ege Yumusak breaks down the relationship between university politics, place-based work, and building power in academia. | The Point

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• These books speculate about what will be left in a post-human world. | The Guardian

• “A clever thief adopting multiple aliases, targeting victims around the world, and acting with no clear motive.” A search for the mysterious figure who’s been stealing book manuscripts before their release. | Vulture

• A high school teacher in Tennessee was fired after assigning his students a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay. | The Atlantic

• Billie Jean King on reclaiming her narrative and her new autobiography. | Los Angeles Times

• Hot commodity: Advanced reader copies, otherwise known as uncorrected proofs, are selling for thousands of dollars on eBay. | Wall Street Journal

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• “A core difference between writing and translation is that the former requires me to vet every layer of what I produce; the latter, not so much.” Lily Meyer considers the pleasures and responsibilities of translation. | Poets and Writers

• How do words lead to justice? Tracking the movement of ideas from the margins to the mainstream. | Public Books

• Nichole Perkins on pop culture as a way of our “recognizing our humanity” and the creative choices behind her memoir. | Entertainment Weekly

• The story of how a book on pandemic psychology, published in late 2019, became “like a Lonely Planet guide” to the coronavirus crisis. | The Guardian

• “We are constantly in profound need, which makes gratitude a deep and fundamental aspect of our lives.” Ross Gay on vulnerability and writing about joy. | NPR’s Code Switch

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Also on Lit Hub:

Alice McDermott on the authority of a great first sentence • How David Foster Wallace used compromise aesthetics to sell Infinite Jest • Yoon Choi on writing immigrant stories in an acquired language • Beowulf Sheehan on learning how to take author photos remotely during the pandemic • Alexey Yurenev documents the COVID quarantine of the Red Army’s dwinding members • Meet the real-life inspiration behind “Mr. Toad” • How avocados became America’s favorite superfood—at the cost of lives in Mexico • A.E. Osworth traces the nerd-to-white-nationalist pipeline • Jo Hamya on the uselessness of internet-driven book culture • The literary afterlife of Elizabeth Barrett Browning • Julie Klam on genealogical brick walls • Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine in conversation • On the cultural history of dreaming • The weirdness of immortalizing exes in fiction • What makes Comic Sans so (literally) memorable • Bill François on the natural treasures of the oyster • Oliver Burkeman on the benefits of nationwide vacation • In defense of the ancient comedian who trolled Aristotle • How the War on Terror became the first “feminist” war • A tiger-seeking trip through the “Wild West” of the USSR • Omri Boehm on the necessary re-imaginings for Israel’s transformation • On the fate of the Himalayan snow leopard in an era of climate change • Patrick Nathan on the fault lines of memory and propaganda • John Lurie recounts the days of sex, drugs, and car-crash jazz • Jennifer C. Nash on the doulas who protect Black mothers • Mansoor Adayfi on the 15 years he spent as Detainee #441 at Guantánamo • When the dismissive editor in your head is your father • What it took to confirm the Big Bang Theory