Lit Hub Weekly: February 19 - 22, 2019

• Elizabeth Strout, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Carmen Maria Machado and more of your favorite writers on how they managed to pay the bills while they wrote (and continue to write!) their books. | Medium
• Meet the scientist who is learning about the past by testing the DNA found in old books. After all, they used to be made out of animal skins. | The Atlantic
• “The mind becomes locked into an obsessive, manic back-and-forth. Interruption is constant but also desired.” How we write differently on a screen. | The New Yorker
• Meg Wolitzer annotates a page from her novel The Wife—the film adaptation is up for an Academy Award. | PBS NewsHour
• Jedediah Britton-Purdy on Martin Hägglund
’s This Life and the philosophical heart of democratic socialism. | The New Republic
• “Life does not go off the rails because it is the rails, goes where it goes.” On Sergio De La Pava’s Lost Empress and Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room. | n+1
• “Reading her now, beyond the anti-porn intransigence she’s both reviled and revered for, one feels a prescient apocalyptic urgency, one perfectly calibrated, it seems, to the high stakes of our time.” On the power and legacy of Andrea Dworkin’s rage. | NYRB
• From Barbara Comyns to Sarah Moss, Maryse Meijer recommends scary books by women that you’ve just got to read. | Publishers Weekly
• “Reader, I did not even have coffee with him. That much I learned in college.” Ron Charles on his favorite final lines from literature. | The Washington Post
• A visual history of the American public library. | CityLab
• “I write to fight all this violence that surrounds our bodies and that we end up not seeing”: Édouard Louis on Emmanuel Macron, the gilets jaunes, and political violence in France. | New Statesman
• “I learned very early that to be an immigrant in this country meant I didn’t have the luxury of choosing what I wanted.” Read an essay by Nicole Dennis-Benn from the anthology The Good Immigrant. | BuzzFeed
• “There is a strong body of opinion that rejects the idea of another Jane Austen statue”: A proposal to include a statue of Jane Austen in Winchester Cathedral was scrapped after residents pushed back. | The Guardian
• “Haymarket aims to be a socialist workplace in a capitalist world.” Read a profile of progressive publishing house Haymarket Books. | Chicago Reader
• It’s official: having good grammar makes you more attractive. Or at least using the Oxford comma does. | GQ
• A 160-year-old letter by a friend of Charles Dickens’ ex-wife shows how the author attempted to commit her to an asylum – for another woman. | Daily Mail

Also on Lit Hub:

The Lit Hub/10 Things I Hate About You crossover of your dreams: 50 iconic literary cameos in 90s movies • “Time is different for us in the tropics.” On the iconic first line of One Hundred Years of Solitude • “I still love the book. It’s a book I can’t defend, and a book I can’t renounce.” Eula Biss reflects on her book a decade after publication • On Lois Weber, the woman who was once the highest-paid director in Hollywood • On David Foster Wallace’s obsession with failure • Lucy Schiller on how to free yourself from the “walking essay” • Daniel Immerwahr on the erasure of American “territories” from U.S. History • There once was a tiger that killed over 400 people! • Margaret Verble on deciphering her convoluted family history and finding Cherokee America • Valeria Luiselli talks freedom, first love, and Mayan ruins • Simpler times: Janet Malcolm at the Rally to Restore Sanity • The best fiction of anxiety • Going deep into the Canadian subarctic for research • The return of Lit Hub Recommends! • Yewande Omotoso on what to do when you’re mistaken for another writer • How worried about virtual reality should we be? • How Louisa May Alcott landed on the front lines of the Civil War • Ahead of the Oscars, Ben Rybeck previews the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees: A Star is Born; Blackkklansman; Can You Ever Forgive Me?; If Beale Street Could Talk; and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs andJames Tate Hill on six audio books to get you through the Oscars

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

Michael Gonzales on Chester Himes’ long out-of-print classic “Run Man Run,” a gritty dive into mid-century prejudice in New York City • Sophie Hannah recommends 15 thrillers that will upend everything you thought you knew • Neil Nyren guides us through the many racetrack mysteries of jockey-turned-author Dick Francis  • Stephen Mack Jones talks crime writing, justice, and Detroit with Dwyer Murphy •  Lee Goldberg on how to write thrillers when crime fiction keeps becoming reality • Get your fix of all things international in our monthly roundup of the best new global mysteries • February’s most gripping debuts • Travel from Paris to the South of France with these 9 mysteries • American presidents can’t stop reading thrillers, just like us • The best new thrillers to hit shelves this February • Lucy Foley’s innovative take on the classic whodunit • “A crime like this is vanishingly rare in real life, so why has it become so endemic in fiction?” Cara Hunter on the trope of the cellar captive • Paul French guides us through Johannesburg’s thriving crime writing scene • Attorney and crime writer James Grippando guides us through a half-century of lawyers in literature