Lit Hub Weekly: July 1 - 5, 2024

• “It’s harder for me to talk about them.” J.C. Gabel talks to Percival Everett about his paintings. | Lit Hub Art
• “Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power.” Rebecca Solnit on the power of speech to shape the future. | Lit Hub
• Read Heba Al-Agha’s diary documenting the last eight months in Gaza, translated by Julia Choucair Vizoso: “It hadn’t been easy, compressing your life into a suitcase. But these are the things we have to do.” | Lit Hub Memoir
• “When it comes to helping people take care of their health and the health of the earth…the law seems to be far behind.” C.L. Skach on balancing the needs of people with the needs of the planet. | Lit Hub Politics
• “To question the possibility of female art is, ultimately, to question the possibility of female thought. In both cases, one wonders how hard Cusk is really looking.” Andrea Long Chu on Rachel Cusk’s gender fundamentalism. | Vulture
• “Combining linear rigidity and spatial abstraction, in Martin’s works I saw an idea of the world that is guided by plans and sure outcomes—a world made whole again.” On Agnes Martin and grief. | The Paris Review
• Hollywood is getting into book publishing. | Inverse
• “You have a knack for making letters as beautiful as evening hours.” Read three letters from Rainer Maria Rilke to the Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. | The Paris Review
• Rebecca Mead on the history of Fitzcarraldo Editions, the publishing house that makes challenging books chic. | The New Yorker
• Lauren LeBlanc revisits Disgrace, which “presag[ed] the series of destabilizing crises that has defined the 21st century.” | Los Angeles Times
• ​​“Though the algorithm machine is probably a symptom, or evidence, of the wrongest things, the last things even, it still feels good, lucky I guess, when it gets it right.” Ross Gay on the small joy of listening to the Fugees in a coffee shop. | Orion
• “Neeli’s enthusiasm—his lust—for poetry was infectious and listening to him often made me feel like a kid falling in love with literature all over again.” Joshua Bodwell remembers Neeli Cherkovski. | Zyzzyva
• On Kōhei Saitō’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, the Kardashians, and the ecological impact of a media empire. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett discuss co-writing their new novel • The Lizzie Borden trial, as told in a newspaper of the time • Space, scarcity, and the production of diasporic aesthetics • The similarities between being a nurse and being a poet • Rafaela Bassili on Claire Messud’s melodramas • Lauren Aliza Green on perfectionism and why she abandoned the violin • Jane Ciabattari talks to Nina Schuyler about giving nature a voice • What working at a restaurant can teach writers • Why white sharks are the serial killers of the sea •Joe Wilkins on his grandfather and the mythology of the American West •Samuel Kọ´láwọlé on being a Black Nigerian man in America • Getting by as an artist in New York City • The impact of climate change on pediatricians (and their patients) • Samuel Roth, book bans, and court-mandated censorship • Joseph O’Neill on writing a socially relevant soccer novel