- “The President of the United States is a deranged liar who surrounds himself with sycophants. Who knew? Everybody did. So why has a poorly written book containing this information become an overnight sensation, a runaway best-seller, and the topic of every other political column, podcast, and dinner conversation?” Masha Gessen on Fire and Fury. | The New Yorker
- Preeminent bird defender and occasional novelist Jonathan Franzen has reiterated his stance that outdoor cats are “an ecological catastrophe.” | The New Republic
- “Television might offer strong competition and attention spans might be sagging, but there may be deeper cultural trends that have led to the decline of novels.” On the TV vs. fiction debate, and also what it misses. | New York Review of Books
- “We let ourselves think we are monsters. We let the monsters carry on.” Lynn Steger Strong on the anger of women. | Catapult
- Denis Johnson, Zadie Smith, Rachel Kushner, and more: The Millions’ Great First-Half 2018 Book Preview has arrived. | The Millions
- “This isn’t what’s normally meant by translation.” On Han Kang, Deborah Smith, and a collaborative translation approach. | The New Yorker
- The Swedish Academy waits 50 years after each Nobel ceremony to reveal the list of nominees. Meet the five women (out of 70) nominated for the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature. | Book Riot
- “I can’t think of a safer place to explore complex emotions for the first time than inside the pages of a book, while sitting in the lap of a loved one.” Matt de la Peña on why we shouldn’t shield children from darkness in children’s books. | TIME
- “You have to write the book you want to see in the world.” A profile of Carmen Maria Machado. | Broadly
- Folie a deux: Kathleen Hale on mental illness and the Slenderman attempted homicide trials of Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier. | Hazlitt
- “The experience of making the spreadsheet has shown me that it is still explosive, radical, and productively dangerous for women to say what we mean.” The creator of the Shitty Media Men List has come forward. | The Cut
- “The problem confronting America is not a dearth of facts; the problem, rather, is that most people want the benefits of a system whose logical extreme—Trump—they can’t tolerate.” On two new books by psychiatrists that question the mental fitness of Donald Trump (and the nation). | n+1
- The women behind Jack Jones Literary Arts on style, the power of beauty, and the books they love. | The Glow Up
- Julian Barnes on Edgar Degas, who “loved talking about art, but hated others talking about it (especially writers).” | London Review of Books
- Find out what book Blackbeard was reading (or at least stuffing his cannons with) when the Queen Anne’s Revenge went down. | The Guardian
Also on Lit Hub:
What do you do when there’s a madman wandering around the White House? Well, if you’re a major national newspaper, you stand up to a government that lies to its citizens. (FILE UNDER: history repeating itself.) • Here is a good essay on writers and their cats, because you deserve a break • From lists to libraries, there’s got to be a better way to categorize the books we love • If it wasn’t for my corporate job, I couldn’t be a novelist (Jillian Medoff would rather talk about sex than reveal how much her novels have made) • How should a Christian writer be? Jamie Quatro on God, sex, and Evangelical America • Forget Orwell and Atwood and all the anointed literary prophets of 2017: allow Gabrielle Bellot to recommend a deep (re)reading of Borges to get you through the end times • The most anticipated crime, mystery, and thriller titles of 2018 (so far) • Translation as an act of political power: Chenxin Jiang on what it means to bring the stories of refugees into English • Do audiobooks count as reading? Writer James Tate Hill fell in love with literature as a visually impaired teen, and wonders what it means to have never really “read” a book • Tessa Hadley and Lucy Hughes-Hallett consider the significance of the country house in literature • 20 famous writers and their early headshots
The Best of Book Marks:
What the critics wrote about Burn Rate, Michael Wolff’s other infamous book • With Winter, the second volume in her seasonal cycle, Ali Smith establishes herself as a writer for our disorienting times • This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Jane Ciabattari on Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and the mavericks of the literary world • Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit: three 1930 reviews of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon • A look back at The Palace of Dreams, Albanian literary icon Ismail Kadare’s censored 1981 parable of totalitarianism • Back in 1997, the New York Times wrote about the Joycean messiness of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle • Ali Smith, Jenny Diski, murderous nannies, and Yellowstone wolves all feature among our Best Reviewed Books of the Week
