Lit Hub Weekly: August 8-12, 2022

TODAY: In 1904, James Joyce’s story “The Sisters,” the first story in his 1914 collection Dubliners, is published in the Irish Homestead.  

• Meeting language at its most elemental place: Belinda Huijuan Tang reflects on re-learning Chinese. | Lit Hub Memoir

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• What do animals understand about death? | Lit Hub Science

• “When people try too hard to pin it down, they often ruin everything that makes poetry magical.” Chris Martin on poetry, autism, and the joy of working with neurodiverse writers. | Lit Hub Poetry

• Christina Lamb on the remarkable life of war correspondent Virginia Cowles, whose “encounters with all the key players have led some to describe her as the Forrest Gump of journalism.” | Lit Hub Biography

• What do Michael Mann, Jim Thorpe, and Kiki de Montparnasse have in common? They all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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

• “Publishing, originally geared toward offering new writers the chance to connect with readers, evermore trends toward an industry narrowly engineered to produce repeat best sellers.” Square Books founder Richard Howarth weighs in on the pending Simon & Schuster acquisition. | The New York Times

• Margaret Sullivan discusses the most effective way to organize against book bans, starting at the local level. | The Washington Post

• “The crossword industry really does consist of earnest wordplay lovers donating their time to unpaid mentorships, generally as part of an industry-wide effort to bring new and underrepresented people into crosswords.” Matt Hartman on the labor of crosswords. | The New Republic

• What’s behind the success of BookTok star and author Colleen Hoover? | Slate

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• “I’d loved the book when I first read it, and had recognized its quality. So why hadn’t I remembered it that way? And what made Bank’s fiction so good?” Cara Blue Adams considers Melissa Bank’s literary legacy. | Gawker

• Heather O’Neill on what horror films understand about pregnancy. | Catapult

• “The bookseller sometimes has more credibility than the professor precisely because she knows what people actually want to buy—and what books are worth buying.” On the social good of bookstores. | The New Yorker

• Emily Zarevich recounts the Roger Dodsworth hoax of 1826, which inspired Mary Shelley. | JSTOR Daily

• Ten artists talk about the books that have impacted them in the past year. | Art in America

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• “It’s a wonderful story. It’s like a party. MY HUSBAND BIT INTO A DONUT AND THERE WAS A TOOTH INSIDE.” Sabrina Orah Mark shares a wild experience. | Astra Magazine

• Considering the ever-changing lexicon of the obscene. | History Today

• Coty Wamp, who was just elected district attorney for Hamilton County, Tennessee, denies that she said she would prosecute librarians—although a viral video shows her suggesting she would do just that. | Jezebel

• Rehooked on phonics: Inside the effort to change the way kids are taught to read. | TIME

• “What baffles me? What am I afraid of? The answer came, spelled out as if in alphabet blocks: ALABAMA.” Andrew Sean Greer on going South to research his novel. | Esquire

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Also on Lit Hub:

Tarek Abi Samra on stealing Kant from a bookstore • Katya Cengel wonders how to write about the war in Ukraine • How America’s river wanderers built a life on the water • Will McGrath on traveling through rural Maine with young children • How CCR, “the Boy Scouts of rock and roll,” took California by storm • The women who paid with their lives in pre-abortion Ireland • “A wine writer who couldn’t smell, let alone taste? Who would ever trust me?” • Meet the first very good boy in the White House, Laddie the Airedale terrier • The long history of anti-abortion law • Kiki Petrosino muses on race and where “brightness” begins • Trying to understand a mother through writing fiction • Kimberly Garza on being a writer from Texas • On the early days of queer feminism • Megan Giddings on getting angry at the movies • Why the simulation theory is a question of faith, not logic • Melody Razak considers women’s testimonies that survived the Partition of India • Four poems of war by Marianna Kiyanovska • On the gruesome methods of justice in Medieval Europe • Jehanne Dubrow on taste: “We are what we eat, because the things we consume become part of our cells.” • Leslye Penelope considers the line between “truthy” and truth

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