Lit Hub Weekly: January 29 – February 2, 2024

• A brief history of the grand old American tradition of banning books. | Lit Hub History
• “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices”: Olivia Rutigliano on Paul Giamatti. | Lit Hub Film
• Rick Bass on hunting, Hemingway, and “death, and learning closure as a writer.” | Lit Hub Craft
• No safe place to grieve: Aisha Abdel Gawad on the danger of talking openly about Palestinian pain. | Lit Hub Memoir
• N Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize-winning Native American novelist, died Wednesday at 89. | The New York Times
• “The most common quarrel between us is this difference between the way each of us makes use of ‘the way it feels.’ In a certain sense it goes to the heart of who we are as writers: why she is a novelist and I a memoirist. Now that I find interesting.” Vivian Gornick on Lore Segal. | NYRB
• “Human and inhuman. Victim and victimizer. Expansive solidarity helps us recognize that we can be both in turn—even at the same moment.” Viet Thanh Nguyen argues for Asian American solidarity. | The Nation
• Just a normal country doing normal things: Russia has placed London-based, best-selling novelist Boris Akunin on its Most Wanted List, presumably because he’s had the temerity to criticize Vladimir Putin. | PEN America
• “[T]he writing space, the notebook space is my privacy. And it always has been.” Daisy Alioto and Kate Zambreno in conversation. | Dirt
• “The tragedies inflicted on the people of East Africa as a result of European rivalries are belittled and forgotten.” Abdulrazak Gurnah on German East Africa. | Granta
• What is the purpose of punctuation? | JSTOR Daily
• “The right’s mission to eradicate public education is in many ways inseparable from their accelerating attacks on LGBTQ rights and racial justice.” Melissa Gira Grant on the conservative war on education. | The New Republic
• “There has never been a worse time to be a UFO skeptic.” You know you want to read Nicholson Baker on this latest bout of alien fever. | NY Mag
• How to approach a book editor: “What you should do, what you can but don’t need to do, and what you will have to do to get published.” | Chronicle of Higher Education
• A proposed bill would make Utah public school teachers criminally liable if banned books are found in their classrooms. | The Salt Lake Tribune
• “It’s also important to see where trans/queer books have long been banned…and how the slow violence of structuring neglect has always constituted life for so many trans/queer people who live against the promises of white LGBT politics.” Sohini Chatterjee interviews Eric Stanley about anti-trans and queer violence. | Public Books
• Helen Garner revisits her early encounters with Tender Is the Night, a novel “way too enjoyable to be literature.” | The Paris Review
• Sarene Leeds asks if Feud: Capote vs. the Swans truly captures the writer’s life. | Vulture
• An Oregon couple working as chauffeurs were charged with wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly stealing $34 million from Win McCormack, the founder of Tin House Books. | NBC News

Also on Lit Hub:

Rebecca Solnit on how to comment on social media • On book hoarding and the perilous paradox of clutter • Aminatta Forna on what fiction can reveal about the fragile fabric of our societies • Rafi Kohan on the joys and functions of sh*t talk • How Betty Smith helped her fellow writers • Poet Gregory Pardlo on tennis and craft • How Ai Weiwei marries advocacy and art at home and abroad • In conversation with legend Padgett Powell • How the transatlantic slave trade helped fuel violent conflict in West Africa • On writing female spies’ classified adventures • Here are the 12 best book covers of January • Brandi Wells on trying to stay true to her identity as a writer • Amanda Chemeche talks to Alex Auder about growing up in the Chelsea Hotel • On how much scientists still don’t know about tornados • The marriage between digital surveillance companies and federal agencies like ICE is putting immigrant rights on the line • Literary film and TV are sweeping the screens in February • Exploring Islamic historical fiction • Maris Kreizman asks why tech bros think books need to be saved