Lit Hub Weekly: July 5-8, 2022

• Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of (the second half of) 2022—or, 230 books to read before 2023. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

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• Gabriel Pasquini peeps into the world of Doug Metzger, and his “extraordinary, dogged, lonely—perhaps hubristic?—quest” to host the most ambitious literary podcast in the world. | Lit Hub History

• Rachel Careau on the equally daunting tasks of translating the “self-evidently literary” Roger Lewinter and the “unfussy” Colette. | Lit Hub On Translation

• Unearthing the story of Mars by counting its craters. | Lit Hub Space!

• 21 new and upcoming historical fiction reads to check out. | CrimeReads

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• Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez, Ron Shelton’s The Church of Baseball, and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Carlos Lozada close-reads Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Dobbs v. Jackson. | The Washington Post

• How has the wave of book banning affected librarians? “Some of the conflicts have gotten so heated that community members have tried to seek criminal charges.” | The New York Times

• Richard Fisher goes inside the Future Library, which stores manuscripts that will not be published until 2113. | BBC

• “Stories are effective weapons, so our usage of them must come with responsibility. This is particularly true of the stories we tell to young people.” On the lies of Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal. | Esquire

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• Is the “apron-tugger” the new bodice-ripper? Bettina Makalintal considers the rise of the food-themed romance novel. | Eater

• “I went into a lot of rooms feeling or being made to feel as though I was lucky to be there—particularly as someone who saw very few people like me in those rooms—so how could I ask for more than what I was offered?” Nicole Chung offers negotiation tips for writers. | The Atlantic

• Read “Peking Duck,” a short story by Ling Ma. | The New Yorker

• Before there was Wordle, there was the Fifteen Puzzle: Adrienne Raphel looks at the history (and lively afterlife) of an early word challenge. | JSTOR Daily

• Rebecca Rukeyser on the best masturbation scenes in fiction. | Electric Lit

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• “As an aspiring author, I want to make sure that my books include different types of people, so that children feel like they are worthy and recognized.” Marwa Bacare, a 12-year-old student, on representation in books. | WBUR

• “Every trans woman I ever met is an artist of her own life.” McKenzie Wark on the writing of trans stories. | The Nation

• Sterling Cunio recounts the process of writing and staging a play while incarcerated. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• Tobias Carroll recommends new books in translation from Kazakhstan, Mexico, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and Cameroon. | Words Without Borders

• Tim Parks considers the work of the translator after the author’s death. | NYRB

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• Michele Saunders recounts a summer with James Baldwin in the South of France. | Document

Also on Lit Hub:

Searching for Joan Didion and Eve Babitz in literary Los Angeles • Why Rachel Yoder doesn’t bully herself into writing • Anuradha Roy finds “love in new languages” at a writing residency • Lincoln Michel on John Wyndham’s Stowaway to Mars • On the laughing queens of early modern Europe • Why Yara Zgheib made the (liberating) switch from memoir to fiction • On free speech and disinformation in the digital age • A literary playlist of 1980s glam French rebellion • Finding inspiration at the intersection of literary and spiritual canons • The cultural and political impact of Naguib Mahfouz • Bull Durham’s Ron Shelton makes his case for baseball as the most literary sport • Katherine Angel on why we write about what we hate • Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood and Viet Thanh Nguyen talk about writing from the Vietnamese diaspora • What will happen when this mass animal migration encounters modern civilization? • Writing a cookbook with chef Kwame Onwuachi • Michael Bourne on killing all your darlings • How to close up a high school library in 2022 • Musings on Jane Eyre, criminal mothers, and Victorian childhoods