Lit Hub Weekly: August 27 - 31, 2018

• “What’s really amazing about that place is that it’s darker than anything could ever be. So dark that when you turn off the flashlight it feels like you can grab the darkness with your hands.” Read “The Wind Cave,” a new short story by Haruki Murakami. | The New Yorker
• “When I’m writing something everything falls into place. When I’m not writing, stuff keeps happening to me and there’s nowhere to put it all.” Catching up with Sally Rooney before the release of her second novel in two years, Normal People. | The Guardian
• Someone did the math on the NYT’s “By the Book” columns—turns out we we were all right, and male authors recommend books by other men four times as often as they do books by women. | Bustle
• “This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore.” Read an excerpt from David L. Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading. | The Paris Review
• “Almost all of the romance novels I have read achieve something that sounds mundane, but remains quite radical: they model a form of female happiness and fulfillment still lacking in most canonical works of literature.” The consolation and pleasure of reading romance novels. | LARB
• The winners of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Award, presented annually to six women writers in the early stages of their career, have been announced. | PW
• “This was never supposed to be a bestseller.” Curtis Sittenfeld reflects on the long road to the release of her now-classic debut novel Prep. | Entertainment Weekly
• Following the controversy and racist attacks that ensued after her appointment to the New York Times editorial board, The Verge has reissued Sarah Jeong’s 2015 book about online harassment, The Internet of Garbage. | The Verge
• “Where did the ghost go?” Why the film adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop lets its source material down. | Slate
• From a 47 acre garbage dump in California to Minnesota’s Mall of America, Amanda Petrusich on the oddball residencies where artists and writers can flee the stifling of our era. | The New Yorker
• “The night is beautiful beyond thought.” On the Alaskan Island that inspired Rockwell Kent’s forgotten classic of nature writing. | Atlas Obscura
• True crime, surreal short stories, a memoir of adoption, and much more: 21 books to look out for this fall. | NYLON
• Tell your BFF: HBO has released the first trailer for their 8-part adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. | Vulture
• Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Katherine Dunn, Lauren Beukes: are these the 50 best horror novels of all time? | Paste
• “All petty, no pain.” On Roxane Gay, her list of sworn enemies, and the rise of nemesis Twitter. | HuffPost

Also on Lit Hub:

When the swamp won’t drain and the fires rage on: Rebecca Solnit on why the President must be impeached • Just how expensive can the writing life be? Melissa Chadburn on the hidden costs being a writer • From Barbara Pym to Barbara Comyns, Patrick DeWitt recommends his favorite mid-century commonwealth writers • As New York City cooks in its own steamy soup, please enjoy these novels of the city’s inevitable apocalyptic destruction • Vanessa Hua on the banned Chinese novel her father loved as a boy • Honestly, have we ever had enough time for reading? • Things changed for Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan the day he realized maybe… he was actually funny • Kristen Arnett really wants you to party at the library • When art imitates art: from Picasso to Keith Haring, 15 portraits of fictional characters • “Our ancestry arises from a dark zone of the living world, a group of creatures about which science, until recent decades, was ignorant.” The tree of life is a freaky, freaky tree • The tale of Amo Afer: Anthony Kwame Appiah on the kidnapped African boy who became a German philosopher • Deborah Eisenberg’s conversation with Paul Holdengraber might convince you to try writing in front of a brick wall • Sharmila Sen on wearing “the mask that grins” as a brown woman, and the courage that anger requires • Whether your back-to-school vibe is “incorrigible stalker,” “aspirational lit-cult member,” or something in between, we have the perfect campus novel recommendation for you • David Auerbach grapples with the language of humans as well as that of machines • 15 beautiful covers by which to judge books this month • The Lit Hub staff’s favorite stories from August

Best of Book Marks:

To mark Women in Translation Month, Heather Cleary (our new Literature in Translation Columnist) recommends five recent literary marvels • The Lonely City and Crudo author Olivia Laing shares her five favorite books about love in the apocalypse • This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: writer and Millions Contributing Editor Nick Ripatrazone on criticism as performance and Twitter as purgatory• Mario Vargas Llosa on the nature of fiction, Neel Mukherjee on the end of the British Empire, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill at 20, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week • From Jewel to Jimmy Carter, Alicia Keys to Ally Sheedy, and, of course, James Franco, we look back on the first reviews of 10 celebrity poetry collections • King Lear in contemporary India, the world’s most infamous fraud, and the life of Arthur Ashe all feature among our Best Reviewed Books of the Week

New on CrimeReads:

The best narrative nonfiction true crime books by journalists, for those who like their facts straight and their sentences twisty • From We Have Always Lived In the Castle to The Butcher Boy, the most compelling crime books narrated by young (and rather disturbed) voices • Do incarcerated people have access to crime novels? Time to take a look at the arbitrary, ridiculous world of prison censorship and answer this question once and for all • Reading crime and mystery can change your life: 7 personal essays that explore the transformative power of reading and writing crime fiction • Crime and the City goes to Phoenix, Arizona for a look at Noir in the Valley of the Sun • How a renegade historian unmasked an impostor: Javier Cercas on truth, reconciliation, and the battle for Spanish history • As the summer of scam draws to a close, a look back on the many articles about con men, scammers, and impostors to appear on CrimeReads over the past few months • “Like the best noir, urban fantasy stories often ask, ‘Where is the line between good and evil?’” A beginner’s guide to urban fantasy noir, from Richard Kadrey • 5 true crime visions of the West Texas mesas, and how to write crime fiction when you’re from an existentially un-scenic place • Read an exclusive excerpt from the new graphic novel noir Slum Wolf, an anthology of graphic novelist Tadao Tsuge’s bleak tales of post-war Japan