Lit Hub Weekly: February 22 – 25, 2022

• Understanding the Ukraine crisis: a comprehensive reading list on Russia, Ukraine, and the rise of Vladimir Putin. | Lit Hub History

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• Jane Pek considers Pride and Prejudice, the gay marriage movement, and the choice to marry. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Why Ed Simon mentally crosses his fingers when saying, “Of course, I don’t think that demons are actually real.” | Lit Hub History

• Robin Kirman considers what literature and psychoanalysis teaches us about disastrous love. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers, Roddy Doyle’s Life Without Children, and Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• Central American horror, Scandinavian suspense, and French and Japanese noirs: CrimeReads editor Molly Odintz rounds up February’s best international crime fiction. | CrimeReads

• David Klion offers an explainer of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. | Jewish Currents

• TAULT has issued a call for translators who work in Ukrainian and Russian “to assist us with an increased demand for Ukrainian literature.” | TAULT

• Timothy Snyder has put together a list of ways to help Ukrainians, ranging from aid to refugees to material support for Ukrainian soldiers on the front line. | Thinking About

• “How can poetry call attention to creative forms of survival and persistence, human and nonhuman?” Margaret Ronda on art that imagines through catastrophe. | Public Books

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• Writer and human rights lawyer Flynn Coleman describes how words function as “technologies of power.” | The Los Angeles Review of Books

• Andrew Solomon and Claudia Rankine discuss the democratic crisis, opting out of harmful discourse, and writing without an intended audience. | Interview

• “Jesus said, ‘Take no thought for the morrow,’ which I take to mean that if we do the right things today, we’ll have done all we really can for tomorrow.” Dorothy Wickenden profiles Wendell Barry. | The New Yorker

• Stephanie Stokes Oliver discusses the legacy, and political implications, of fashion during the Civil Rights Movement. | Harper’s Bazaar

• “Trotter and his collaborators force viewers into a complex and sometimes even uncomfortable conversation about the substance of racial identity.” Reginald Dwayne Betts on the work of Tariq Trotter. | New York Times Magazine

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• Margaret Atwood explains her preoccupation with The Wizard of Oz. | Los Angeles Times

• “Take me or leave me or, as is the usual order of things, both.” Read the Divorce Issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. | Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

• “Alas, who among translators has not wanted, at least on occasion, to get into a proper argument with their author?” Juana Adcock illustrates scenes from the life of a translator. | Poetry Foundation

• In typing Mrs Dalloway from beginning to end, Jo-Ann Wallace became intimately acquainted with Virginia Woolf’s eccentric punctuation. | London Review of Books

• “The land insists that we tell the whole story, riotous and chaotic, beautiful and terrible.” Imani Perry and Virginia Richards explore the American South’s “Inner Passage” in text and photograph. | Smithsonian

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• ASMR for readers: Watch how a book gets made—specifically, Moon Witch, Spider King—from Marlon James’s office to that sweet, sweet jacket wrapper machine. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub:

The first in a series featuring contemporary poetry from Ukraine • Ben Okri on writing a children’s book as an antidote to doomsday thinking • Patrick Strickland on the very real dangers of artificial borders • Poet-novelist-playwright Quan Barry wants you to wear many hats • On the not-so-unlikely friendship between Vladimir Nabokov and William F. Buckley, Jr. • Some reassuring writing advice from George Saunders • Daniel Genis on reading his way through a prison sentence • “I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I do believe in archives” • On the secret lives on sandhoppers • A serious look at poetic wordplay • The life and times of the scientist who inspired Dr. Strangelove • After living with ALS for 14 years, lifelong reader David Stam offers practical accessibility advice for publishers • How much was WWI about bread? • “Could Joyce really be saying that a specter is haunting Dedalus—the specter of gay thoughts?” • Amelia Morris on female archetypes and wildness • How Eve Ensler shaped the five Wives of Mad Max: Fury Road • What we get out of sad stories, as writers and as reader • What pornographic literature shows us about human nature • How to tell when you have a short story collection