Lit Hub Weekly: June 20-23, 2023

• At long last, summer has arrived! Celebrate with 50 of the greatest summery novels of all time (according to us). | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Sometimes all you need to get writing again is… Taylor Swift. | Lit Hub Music

• “Self-hating, dishonest, twisted stories diminish our lives and prevent us from knowing who we are.” Learning how to live from Emerson. | Lit Hub

• Gentle wisdom for a postwar era: Lisa Rowe Fraustino considers the context of The Velveteen Rabbit as it turns 100. | Lit Hub History

• Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, K Patrick’s Mrs. S, and Alexander Stille’s The Sullivanians all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• Jill Dearman on Jekyll and Hyde, transformation, and conservative reactionaries. | CrimeReads

• “Trash pickup was on a certain day every week, and I learned that once it’s on the curb it’s public property. Cormac put his out the day before.” Debbie Nathan on digging through Cormac McCarthy’s trash. | Slate

• “The mother didn’t care how expensive anything was; she would cover it secretly. Did this sound crazy? Absolutely. Did I need the money? Yes.” Xochitl Gonzalez on her former career as a wedding planner. | The Atlantic

• Katy Waldman talks to Deborah Levy about mothers, shame, and the ongoing search for the missing female character. | The New Yorker

• Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi writes about James Baldwin’s time in Istanbul, where he experienced “one of the most prolific periods of his artistic life.” | The Yale Review

• Authors and students are suing Florida over the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. | The New York Times

• Robin D.G. Kelley on the long war on Black studies. | New York Review of Books

• “Being a Big Brother is hard. I bet it makes you angry when Winston doesn’t submit to your will.” Jessie Gaynor explores gentle parenting in classic literature. | McSweeney’s

• “Being friends with a genius isn’t always easy. Sometimes you are loved, as Norén loved me until that coffee date on August 30, 2015.” Elisabeth Åsbrink on her literary breakup with Swedish playwright Lars Norén. | The Dial

• “She described everything she saw with the curiosity and precision of a naturalist’s eye.” On Virginia Woolf’s forgotten diary. | The Paris Review

• A look inside Britain’s queer bookshop boom. | Dazed

• Go for a stroll in some of these literary woods. | Orion

• “I don’t think there was ever any one moment that crystallized my realization of my father’s thing as it were, it is, something I’ve lived with all my life.” An interview with George Orwell’s son. | The Shortlisted

• Every Story Needs a Dungeon, and other lessons writers can learn from The Legend of Zelda. | The Audacity

• Kaitlyn Greenidge talks to Annie Abrams about the history of the Advanced Placement test, and the way toward a more equitable future. | Harper’s Bazaar

• Are these the most influential works of postwar queer literature? | T Magazine

Also on Lit Hub:

Lorrie Moore wants you to know that Ethan Hawke is a terrific novelist • Good luck tracking down Umberto Eco’s favorite books! • A roundtable on the importance of critical race theory • Against suffering for art • Tips from an interior designer for those overflowing bookshelves • Exploring the culinary history of France • Hollywood designer Claudia Cravens explains how (and why) to think like a costume designer • On the experience of Black WWII veterans •  Stephen Aiken captures a 1974 (literary) star-studded public debate in the East Village • Stacy Jane Grover recounts the quiet shuffle of a death vigil in Central Appalachia • Meet the revolutionary Chinese suffragette who challenged America’s politics • Rewriting the story of the Genain quadruplets • Inside a watchmaker’s (miraculous) world • On language, faith, and family at the US/Mexico border • Has our praise for TV’s antiheroes been misplaced? • Winnie Li on the Instragrammable dream of a writing space versus the (freeing, messy) reality • How German writers reacted to Hitler’s rise • Translating a 20th-century Bulgarian classic • Coming of age in central Florida’s orange groves