Lit Hub Weekly: February 27–March 3, 2023

• Alice Robb on being unproductive at a writing residency: “I left not with the finished chapters I had hoped for, but with the knowledge that writing is—at least for me—a social act.” | Lit Hub

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• Willard Spiegelman on pinning down the biography of poet Amy Clampitt, a Patron Saint of Late Bloomers. | Lit Hub Criticism

• A peek into 1960s Sydney, Australia, the drag capital of the world. | Lit Hub

• How a young Karl Lagerfeld discovered a love of literature. | Lit Hub Biography

• Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island, Kate Zernike’s The Exceptions, and Priya Guns’s Your Driver Is Waiting all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• From pop stars to metalheads (and beyond), seven crime novels about musicians to look out for this year. | CrimeReads

• Finally, someone is comparing Ron DeSantis’s new memoir to the glories of Cocaine Bear. | The Washington Post

• “Like thousands of young women before me, I wrote to Judy Blume because something strange was happening to my body.” Amy Weiss-Meyer on why we still need Judy Blume. | The Atlantic

• A new Toni Morrison exhibition at Princeton “paints a mesmerizing portrait of an author who worked whenever and wherever.” | Vogue

• “When a community pulls itself together and makes a stink, that is where the real work is done. It’s all local, and that’s where the dig is.” How booksellers are responding to book bans. | Publishers Weekly

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• “How to write about the environmental fallout of an ongoing, active shooting war?” Five Ukrainian writers on the immediate and long-term ecological damage of a war that has no end in sight. | Emergence Magazine

• “Daunt decided not to lay off any booksellers, whom he viewed as the company’s most precious resource.” Is James Daunt’s rethinking of Barnes & Noble… working? | Fast Company

• Will Higginbotham explores the sites in Oxford where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien discovered a life-changing friendship. | The New York Times

• From Chinua Achebe to Toyin Falola: 5 essential books Nigeria’s new president should read. | The Conversation

• Have you ever fallen asleep at the library and gotten locked in overnight? Well now you can pay for the privilege… | The Guardian

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• Haruki Murakami’s first novel in six years will be published in April, and a new Zadie Smith novel arrives this fall. | The Hub

• “A great writer of the eccentric soul.” Colm Tóibín delivers a lecture on the subject of his latest novel, Thomas Mann. | The Heights

• “The longer you know your characters, the more precisely you can render them.” Paul Harding on trusting the process, teaching Shakespeare, and his new novel, This Other Eden. | The Millions

• Sachin Ketkar talks to Jenny Bhatt about subtractive and creative bilingualism, and the challenges of Gujarati translation. | Words Without Borders

• “Is the unmodified body a standard-bearer for real bodies, a regulative ideal that actual anatomy can at best approximate?” Becca Rothfeld on feminist critiques of body modification. | Boston Review

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• “The war takes everything from us, but one of the first things it takes is our time, our productive years, the period that we refer to as ‘the prime of life.’” Andriy Lyubka on war and coffee in the new issue of HEAT. | HEAT

Also on Lit Hub:

Carolyn Forche remembers the late, great Charles Simic • Lidia Yuknavitch on her teaching philosophy • Inside the emergency room on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic • How Leonardo da Vinci re-centered the human form • Megan Buskey reflects on her family’s past in Ukraine • On the political education of Bob Dylan • The early days of bioelectricity, when reanimating corpses was all the rage • How the scientific method came to be • The transformative nature of “microjoys” • Donal Ryan on mourning an unpublishable novel • Christie Tate mourns the friend who taught her “how one life can alter another” • Lucy Scholes revisits Francis King’s Booker winner The Nick of Time • The evolution of the world’s oldest encyclopedia • How pioneer abortionist Madame Restell learned her trade • Will Schwalbe recalls the start of an unlikely friendship • Mirza Waheed on the joys of omnivorous reading • Why we still love Victorian literature • Lakiesha Carr on returning home to write • Revisit the day explorers finally found Ernest Shackleton’s shipwreck • Meet the women who risked their lives to save the works of Hildegard of Bingen