Lit Hub Weekly: June 10 - 14, 2019

• The American myths of westward expansion that just won’t die: Lauren Markham on two very different stories of Manifest Destiny. | Lit Hub
• The hero we need: Marjorie Liu on how Keanu Reeves is demolishing all our dumb stereotypes. | Lit Hub
• Dan Albert looks at the history and consequences of one of the great abuses of police power in contemporary life: the traffic stop. | Lit Hub
• Parul Sehgal on Naomi Wolf’s suspect mythology, Terry Tempest Williams on Robert Macfarlane’s beautiful darkness, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
•  A first look at new revelations about the cover-up in the murder of The Notorious B.I.G., from Randall Sullivan. | CrimeReads
• “I know it was a little insouciant to be like, I dare you! I dare you to call this chick lit! But whatever. Call it whatever you’re going to call it. Just read it. Or don’t.” Elizabeth Gilbert on City of Girls, desire, strong female characters, and writing from scars. | BuzzFeed News
• A comic ode to Franz Kafka’s comic side. | The New York Times
• “This is the allure of the axe: It is a simple, efficient tool charged with power and violence.” Jonny Diamond on axe throwing, gender, and more. | Longreads
• “No homo, he had said. But all I heard, all I still hear, is No human. How can we not ask masculinity to change when, within it, we have become so wounded?” Ocean Vuong on masculinity and humanity. | The Paris Review
• Kristen Arnett, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and more recommend summer itineraries inspired by their novels. | Vanity Fair
• “It wasn’t a foreign notion that if you had stripped people of something you might actually owe them something”: Five years after the publication of “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits this debate with David Remnick. | The New Yorker
• A timeline charts the tumultuous rise and fall of the Barnes & Noble bookselling empire. | Vulture
• “There is absolutely no civilization without migration”: Aleksandar Hemon on his family’s displacement, and the transformative potential of migration. | The Globe and Mail
• A seance, “ a crate load of Airedale terriers,” and a brilliantly passive-aggressive pseudonym: the story of Agatha Christie’s 11-day disappearance in 1926. | The New York Times
• “We don’t talk about it, but there are parts of war that are glamorous, that are exciting. There’s a part of it that’s incredibly seductive.” Read an interview with author and veteran Elliot Ackerman. | Esquire
• A Hollywood literary agency has dropped former Central Park Five prosecutor Linda Fairstein. It is the latest fallout for the bestselling author after the premiere of When They See Us, a Netflix series about the case. | Essence
• “Writing is inherently paradoxical…what we hate about it is also what we love about it.” An important examination of why writing sucks. | The Cut
• “It hadn’t occurred to me until I read them that antiwar novels could be funny as well as serious.” Salman Rushdie on Slaughterhouse-Five. | The New Yorker
• “Not everything is going to be loved by everyone, especially when this everyone has been told they have to on the basis that they’ll find reflections of themselves there.” On Fleabag, Normal People, “Cat Person,” and the problem with our cultural insistence on the  “Archetypal Millennial Woman.” | Another Gaze
• “I knew that someday, that part of his collection would end up on my own bookshelves. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.” One woman’s quest for the perfect shelf to hold the books she inherited from her father. | Curbed

Also on Lit Hub:

The beachiest, buzziest, bookiest list of them all: the ultimate books of summer 2019 preview • Barbara Hurd on the lessons of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland • Sharon Marcus on the early origins of celebrity worship • Andrea Lawlor recommends some essential bookselling reads • David Epstein on the genius of the self-taught musician • How Beyoncé revolutionized the American political landscape • Lauren Acampora on the links between dreamlife and creativity • James Tate Hill on 5 audiobooks with complicated parent/child relationships • A lover’s view of Picasso: on Françoise Gilot’s classic account of life with a “great man” • On Alabama’s dark history of brutalizing black women’s bodies • What David Bowie borrowed from William Burroughs • Jim DeRogatis on R. Kelly and separating art from the artist • Ellena Savage on the complicated past, present, and future of pools • Five books with complex and credible child narrators • Elliot Ackerman travels to a refugee camp on the Syrian border in 2015, after the story’s “gone elsewhere” • Aleksandar Hemon on the preoccupations of his 10-year-old self • What the 39,933 items on Peter Matthiessen’s computer mean for the art of biography • Suketu Mehta on the origins of anti-immigrant rhetoric • Fighting to save the real-life pharmacy from James Joyce’s Ulysses • HAPPY FATHER’S DAY: John James on learning about the death of his father in a poem by his grandmother · A brief literary history of terrible dads · Dean Kuipers on the things you talk about to avoid really talking · Sybille Lacan on the absences of her famous father · When Red Sox great Luis Tiant was reunited with his father after 14 years

Best of Book Marks:

Congratulations to Emily Ruskovich, winner of this year’s International Dublin Literary Award and to Ling Ma, winner of this year’s Young Lions Fiction Award • This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians: twist endings, librarian stereotypes, and Nora Roberts books as projectiles • John Domini recommends five great novels of Italian-American immigration, from Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim to Don DeLillo’s Underworld • This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Annie Galvin on Samuel Beckett, Fever Dream, and Jia Tolentino • New titles from Aleksandar Hemon, Brian Evenson, and Mona Awad all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

New on CrimeReads:

James Ellroy walks into a steakhouse and orders clams • Peter Houlahan on how Los Angeles became the “Bank Robbery Capital of the World” • What to read if you like Big Little Lies • Mike Chase investigates the war on margarine and other pseudo-dairy at the turn of the century • Becky Masterman on what Truman Capote missed in his true crime opus • Zach Vasquez reconsiders Bob Dylan as a hard-boiled poet • All the psychological thrillers you need to read this June •Daneet Steffens‏ on Mick Herron, the master of misfit spy thrillers • Sandra Ireland on the many commonalities of folklore and crime fiction