Lit Hub Weekly: June 10 - 14, 2024

• Can’t figure out what book to bring to the beach? The ultimate summer reading list is here. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Who’s the worst dad in literature? Garth Risk Hallberg on the most dysfunctional fathers of the Western canon. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “Each moment of recognition was only possible because of the specific choices of an individual bureaucrat.” On what it means to search for queerness in state records. | Lit Hub History
• Living with a literary icon can teach some incredible lessons. Cory Leadbeater on his life-changing friendship with Joan Didion. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “When I find depictions of people with larger bodies in fiction, the portrayals are nearly always pejorative, jeering, or demeaning.” Emma Copley Eisenberg on fatness in American novels. | The New Republic
• The hot new trend in European bookstores is… English language books. | The New York Times
• “Niger now joins Mali and Burkina Faso in a rejection line of former French colonies in West Africa. Once an indispensable partner, France is now disposable.” On two books about French colonization. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Pulitzer Prize-winning Playwright Annie Baker on turning her “world-building attention” to the big screen. | The New Yorker 
• Juno Richards on trans panic, trans femininity in history, and Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Clair Wang reports on the rise of indie bookstores with a social mission. | The New York Times
• How Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize became associated genocide. | The Walrus
• On professional wrestling, American politics, and Josephine Riesman’s Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. | Public Books
• Christine Smallwood considers the material constraints of writing criticism today. | The Yale Review
• “There may be fewer dogs on the internet these days, but there are an awful lot of writers. And some of them are very online.” On the trajectory of internet writing. | The Baffler
• May Wang explores what olive trees mean to Palestine. | JSTOR Daily
• “When I die I am going to ask her some questions about the lesbian thing.” Patricia Lockwood on A.S. Byatt’s life and work. | London Review of Books
• In her acceptance speech for the 2024 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature, Marcia Lynx Qualey considers the work of translation in a time of violence. | Words Without Borders
• On the post-colonial literature of Filipino American novelist and poet Carlos Bulosan. | JSTOR Daily
• “The best writing about covid is flexible, figurative, and hard to pin down.” Katy Waldman considers the literature of the pandemic. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub:

A conversation with poet Alan Felsenthal • Ed Simon on Charles Fort and the boundaries between science and speculation • Why poets should read romance fiction • What it means to grow up Black in Appalachia • What happened with Britain’s forgotten pandemic? • On Elaine May and balancing biography with a fan’s enthusiasm • Gender, performativity, and the unreality of professional wrestling • Teddy Wayne asks 7 questions (with no wrong answers) • Boyce Upholt on what the Mississippi River means to America • Jane Ciabattari talks to Robin Sloan • D.S. Waldman considers John Ashbery, Ben Lerner, and Georges Braque • What Jane Austen’s work can tell us about the colonial legacy of the English countryside • What if Jane Austen is actually the master of anti-romance? • Mac Crane on basketball, performing femininity, and whiteness • Melissa Lozada-Oliva and Puloma Ghosh on translating grief into literary horror • Why a dead dog might also kill a book • Tomas Moniz on trauma, healing and houseplants • Elisa Gabbert on poetry and essay • What science can reveal about our own fragile self-conceptions • What writing workshops can learn from stand up comedy • What white women’s patronage of Black Harlem Renaissance artists exposes about race in America • Lai Wen on sci-fi and the need for Chinese protest literature today • Why “genocide is the single most important and urgent threat to free speech on this planet.” • How to win The New Yorker’s Caption Contest • In praise of Laurie Colwin • On the golden age of celebrity profiles • Kristopher Jansma on starting a Ulysses reading group • Kristen Arnett answers your awkward questions • What does Byron have in common with the Borgias? • Catherine Joy White on Beyoncé’s “Formation” and its embodiment of Black womanhood • John Copenhaver defends the queer villain • Why “Wisconsin was paradise” to a young John Muir