Lit Hub Weekly: February 6-10, 2023

TODAY: In 1963, Sylvia Plath dies.   

• Booksellers from The Strand remember the coolest celebrity “cart shark” of them all: Television frontman Tom Verlaine. | Lit Hub Bookstores & Libraries

• Food as sustenance and political metaphor: How White House dinners shape presidential policy. | Lit Hub Politics

• “Will this book, like so many cultural products made by creatives of color, be expected to somehow prove the viability of Black novels in the marketplace?” Debut author Laura Warrell on publishing while Black. | Lit Hub Memoir

• In other literary couple news, Carmela Ciuraru explores the unequal marriage of Kingsley Amis and Jane Howard. | Lit Hub History

• Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, Thomas Mallon’s Up With the Sun, and Mark Whitaker’s Saying It Loud all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Scrumptious cozy mystery series to tempt your palate. | CrimeReads

• “I asked how his spirits were. ‘Well, you know, I’ve been better,’ he said dryly.” David Remnick talks to Salman Rushdie. | The New Yorker

• Chels Upton dives into the (many) Colleen Hoover backlashes. | Slate

• “Fleishman persists among this specific group of women who are both well off and strung out.” Caitlin Moscatello considers the influence of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel and adaptation. | The Cut

• “Writing is just a bunch of decisions you have to make. Back to the Kierkegaard: Do it or don’t.” Percival Everett on craft and endings. | LARB

• “Even if he has adopted the manners and customs of the elite, he refuses to adopt their indifference.” Tara K. Menon considers Édouard Louis’s chronicles of class. | The Nation

• “I’m not an Olympic athlete. Literature doesn’t represent anything.” Joshua Hunt profiles Mieko Kawakami. | The New York Times Magazine

• “For me, writing is less about metabolizing raw experience than about getting outside it: reaching some level of analytical remove from which I can really see the limitations of my own point of view.” Read an interview with Maggie Millner. | Poets.org

• “Pierre Bourdieu’s political commitment to the strike made me see it as my duty as a writer not to remain a passive onlooker in public life.” Annie Ernaux on the 1995 French general strikes (tr. by Lucie Elven). | Le Monde Diplomatique

• “I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness—moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist.” Helen Garner on happiness. | The Guardian

• Ron Charles digs into some common readerly pet peeves, from dream scenes to clever children. | The Washington Post

• Andrea Long Chu considers HBO’s The Last of Us, and what it looks like for TV to adapt a video game “by taking its story and swallowing it whole.” | Vulture

• Writing is an ethical act, says Jonathan Malesic—which is one thing ChatGPT can’t teach students. | The Atlantic

• When Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain, horror followed. | The New York Times

• “Victory City is, in many and the worst ways, classic Rushdie.” Zain Khalid considers Salman Rushdie’s body of work. | The Drift

• Victoria Lessard considers the legacy of “the clinch”—the iconic romance cover designs that “play into the public’s idea of the books selling sexuality as uncontrollable desire.” | Hazlitt

Also on Lit Hub:

Nikole Hannah-Jones on opposition to the 1619 Project and teaching slavery in schools • Kwame Dawes reflects on the legacy of rhetorician and abolitionist Frederick Douglass • Ann Napolitano on seeing her book Dear Edward adapted for TV • What Oslo’s Future Library means for writers and the written word • On the DEI initiative at NASA that launched Astronaut Class 8 • Sylvia Plath’s genre-defying The Bell Jar at 60 • How On the Waterfront made Marlon Brando a cinematic icon • Why we need the wildness of the great gray owl • What therapy does for a writer’s work • Alane Salierno Mason calls for a writing community that takes care of its own • Channeling a dolphin’s narrative voice • On (not) bringing children into a world in crisis • On Paul Revere’s ride and what came next • How America came to enthusiastically embrace sushi

---