Lit Hub Weekly: January 3-6, 2023

TODAY:  In 1986, Mexican author Juan Rulfo dies at 67.   

• “I raised four children, wrote five more novels—and finally got old enough to think about being young.” Allegra Goodman on writing about youth. | Lit Hub

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• Standing under Mussolini’s balcony: Andrea Bajani considers fascism and family in modern Italy (tr. by Minna Zallman Proctor). | Lit Hub History

• How the tiniest of particles helped build the modern world. | Lit Hub Science

• Bill McKibben in praise of writing (sprawling, comic) serialized novels. | Lit Hub

• Tom Crewe’s The New Life, Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens, and Matthew Dennison’s Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• Faced with Ron DeSantis’ restrictions on teaching CRT in higher education, Florida professors are canceling classes that focus on race. | ProPublica

• “I take speaking the past to the future to be a primary moral responsibility of the art.” Jorie Graham talks to Katy Waldman about distraction, voice, and the poetic mind. | The New Yorker

• Take a look inside BEM Books & More, a bookstore dedicated to Black food writing. | Bon Appetit

• “The Partition is so weighted in the South Asian imagination that, even when we’re not talking about it explicitly, it informs our mindsets, actions, and behaviors.” Read the new issue of Desi Books Review, on the 75th anniversary of the Partition. | Desi Books Review

• “Going home can feel particularly daunting; one may return to a place they don’t recognize, or find that they themselves have changed in ways that mean it will never be the same.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maxim Osipov, and others recount going home. | The Atlantic

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• “First introduced to the world as an insert in New York Magazine, Ms. demonstrated the potential for journalism that centered news and analysis around women.” On its 50th anniversary, a history of Ms. Magazine. | The Cut

• “Whiteness was framed as freedom.” Matthew K. Ritchie considers American racial satire. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Kevin Koczwara explores the prescience of Don Delillo’s “perfect satire” White Noise. | Esquire

• Filippo Bernardini, who was accused of stealing hundreds of unpublished manuscripts by impersonating agents, editors, and authors, is expected to plead guilty to wire fraud. | The New York Times

• “Watching her journey has changed me in ways I’m only now beginning to process.” Lorraine Berry remembers novelist Cai Emmons, who died Monday at 71. | Los Angeles Times

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• Sarah Marshall considers the lessons of the serial killer media industrial complex. | The Believer 

• “I don’t really believe there is a power dynamic between author and editor, when the relationship is wholesome.” Terry Gross interviews Robert Gottlieb, editor of Caro and le Carré. | NPR

• “There’s a clear change in the comedic sensibilities, an altered shade of the absurd.” Alexander Sammartino considers the evolution of George Saunders’s comedy. | The Millions

• “The very first version of a public library was created by and for middle- and upper-class white men, and this has permeated libraries for centuries.” Amanda Oliver dissects the library’s systemic failures. | Electric Lit

• Ever wondered how James Patterson writes 31 books at the same time? | GQ 

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Also on Lit Hub:

12 new books to kick off your 2023 reading • How Zora Neale Hurston’s study of hoodoo helped Tracey Rose Peyton make peace with her father • Susanne Pari discusses Iran’s rich history of feminist rebellion • A letter from a teenage Joycean and Ukrainian refugee • Lessons in writing and life from The Golden Girls • V.V. Ganeshananthan on authenticity, research, and writing about Sri Lanka • Aanchal Malhotra reflects on writing a historical novel as a historian • On Samuel Beckett’s search for home • On translation and inherited trauma (or, what it means to truly inhabit an author’s work) • Will Cathcart muses on The Passenger, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the birth of his son • A brief history of American socialism • Michelle Nijhuis considers the new film adaptation of Women Talking • Alessandro Delfanti reads Pinocchio as a radical anti-work story • Rachel Swartzmann muses on the sanctity of journaling • How women’s contributions to fighting fascism were forgotten

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