Lit Hub Weekly: February 18 - 21, 2020

• “Your friends say The novelist, Brandon Taylor, and you want to die of shame.” When the short story writer (reluctantly) goes long. | Lit Hub Craft and Advice
• Charlotte Alter on how the well-educated and downwardly mobile found (a gentle version of) socialism. | Lit Hub Politics
• Sex! Revenge! Redcoats! The sensational true story of the build-up to the Boston Massacre. | Lit Hub History
• Ruth Franklin on Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, Jeremy O. Harris on Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Gabino Iglesias rounds up the best small presses publishing indie crime fiction today. | CrimeReads
• Victoria Coates, the former national security adviser who some suspect of writing The Warning, an anonymously authored exposé of the Trump administration, has been transferred to the Department of Energy. | The New York Times
• These random literary encounters remind us that surprise is instrumental to good storytelling. | The Guardian
• Since the 18th century, fan-fiction in the Anglophone world has given readers an opportunity to be socially (and sexually) experimental, including work inspired by Gulliver’s Travels and Pamela. | The Atlantic
• With same-sex relations still criminalized in most African countries, what role can queer fiction play in the continent today? | The Star
• Elizabeth Wurtzel helped establish “a genre that borrows from the ugly past and looks to a radical future: the feminist disability memoir.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Despite the fact that Diana Gabaldon “hadn’t even set foot in Scotland” when she began writing the series, Outlander-specific tourism is booming there. | The Washington Post
• “A lot of the messiness in Vanessa’s psyche comes from a culture that celebrates abuse as something from which great art can be made.” Read a profile of My Dark Vanessa author Kate Elizabeth Russell. | Vulture
• OK Doomer: On the recent trend of “doomer lit,” which is what you’d get if cli-fi were a little more melancholy and fatalistic. | WIRED
• “A funny writer is a writer to whom the reader gives a great deal of power, and gladly.” Lauren Groff on the subversion of Lorrie Moore’s work and wit. | New York Review of Books
• “I couldn’t give up either of you”: Lily King on a different kind of love triangle. | Vogue
• “The point of killing your darlings is to create a controlled environment for heightened feeling.” On deathfic, the “ice bath of recreational reading,” in which writers kill off beloved characters again and again. | The Atlantic
• “Ach! it’s a terrible, horrible job / hauling a hippo out of a bog.” Anthony Madrid on the unique challenges of translating “Russia’s Dr. Seuss.” | The Paris Review
• In praise of the New York Times Spelling Bee: Laura Lippman on her obsession with the “no-holds-barred Boggle.” | Slate
• Twenty years after The Story of V, publishers are much more willing to print the word “vagina.” | The Guardian
• “In part, I love Portis because I feel less mean when I read him.” Wells Tower on the cult of Charles Portis. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub:

Julian Barnes on a (different) age of fake news and “gangster imperialism” • On the madness of crowds in the global age of terror • Jenn Shapland catalogues the clothing of Carson McCullers • Daily chronicles of life under quarantine at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak • Judith Butler on the case for nonviolence • 21 documentaries that redefined the genre • Inside Larry McMurtry’s home library • On the biggest cultural phenomenon the world has ever known: football (aka soccer) • Conor Dougherty on the books that helped him understand the housing crisis in America • Stephen Hough on the anxieties of a life in music • Ander Monson considers the elegies all around us • On the devastating fallout of addiction and corporate burnout • Veronica Esposito on moving beyond a misgendered childhood • On the book that began as an acid-fueled speech • Emily Temple on 2020’s Emma • Three trees that tell the story of ancient cultures • Name a more iconic duo than humans and beans • Philip Kennicott: When music is your first language • How to be a Beatles fan without really trying • Does the lost lyric poetry of Amelia Earhart offer clues to the pilot’s “private obsessions with love and death” • Chelsea Leu on the seductions and limitations of self-help, a billion-dollar genre • A conversation with Danez Smith • Stephen Batchelor on the practice of ethical awareness • Victoria Chang on the self and its many deaths • Relearning to write after law school buried my voice • Finding humanity and humility in Alberto Giacometti • Suggestions for new high school rom-com adaptations of literary classics

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

7 debut crime and mystery novels you should read this February • Silvia Moreno-Garcia on the gothic roots of domestic suspense • A conversation between Megan Miranda and Mary Kubica • Explorer Roman Dial’s long search for his missing son, lost in the Costa Rican jungle • Paul French on the crime novels of Aberdeen • “Let us take a look at some books that bend and buckle at their structural seams based on the tenuousness of its narrator.” • Meg Gardiner on serial killers, archetypes, and Southern California • Heather Chavez rounds up 6 thrillers featuring protective parents • Tosca Lee recommends apocalyptic thrillers • Andy Davidson on love and environmentalism in the Swamp Monster comics