Lit Hub Weekly: July 6 - 10

• The Great Second Half Preview is here, AKA 222 books we want to read before 2022. | Lit Hub

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• From Shakespeare to Lovecraft to Stephen King, Austin Ratner on the glorious, wonderful, and prodigious literature of the rat (and no, a rat did not write this). | Lit Hub Criticism

• Deus ex machina with a credit card: Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta consider our literary fixation on the very wealthy. | Lit Hub

• When lending your friend money works out, or, when Franklin Pierce saved Nathaniel Hawthorne from financial ruin. | Lit Hub History

• Rob Doyle on Quentin Tarantino’s debut novel, Mark O’Connell on Nathaniel Rich’s vision of a world remade, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

• How Agatha Christie helped popularize surfing—yes, surfing. | CrimeReads

• Alexis Nowicki on finding out the world’s only viral short story was, in fact, based on her life. | Slate

• Scott Borchert calls for a new Federal Writers’ Project. | The New York Times

• “We were all locked down and I realized that the experience that I had gone through on the cruise ship was a good parallel to what we were all collectively experiencing.” Chaney Kwak explains how a cruise ship nightmare became a memoir. | NPR Morning Edition

• What’s the purpose of a book blurb? Tom Beer briefly unpacks the latest discourse. | Kirkus

• “Words resonate differently from one country, one collective, one people, to the next.” Mark Polizzotti dissects the many complications of translation. | The MIT Press Reader

• Emily Yoon Perez, Kristina Huang, and others analyze the role of anti-racism in the academy. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• “Perhaps after a year of being too online, Bimboism is the antidote.” Marlowe Granados on the new era of the bimbo. | The Baffler

• “They only know art as a mirror, never as a doorway.” Lincoln Michel considers bad-faith criticism and the power of messy, ambiguous art. | Countercraft

• Rodrigo Garcia discusses his new memoir and the death of his father, Gabriel García Márquez. | Los Angeles Times

• Anne Theroux, ex-wife of Paul Theroux, shares the realities of being the spouse of a famous writer. | The Guardian

• “This is what falling in love with blackness looks like. It’s messy. It’s angry. It’s silly. It’s beautiful. It’s sad.” Namwali Serpell on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and “the process of becoming black.” | NPR

• Brian Broome talks about his most loved—and most hated—books of his childhood and high school years. | Debutiful

• Are email newsletters a “new” literary genre? | The Cut

• “The issue of consensual sex has often been presented in France as a problem of language and interpretation.” On France’s literary #MeToo reckoning. | The Baffler

• “Our names, and selves, function, first, in social spaces, as reflections echoed back to us.” Victoria Princewill explores the meaning of a family name. | Granta

Also on Lit Hub:

100 literary Jeopardy! clues to bust out in good company • William di Canzio on queer genealogies • After WWI, in all its liberated glory, Paris danced • On Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s memoir about Japanese immigrants in 19th-century Ohio • Helen Scales considers the high stakes of deep-sea mining • Matt Haig on the downfalls of binary thinking • How to befriend a wild fox • Jessica Hopper on rock, rapture, and what artists do that mortals cannot • On honoring the “dull, repetitive” middle years of social movements • Paul Legault on the collage art of John Ashbery • Elina Zhang on growing up the child of Chinese immigrants • David Chrisinger considers the types of stories that resonate with trauma survivors • Tim Parks follows in the footsteps of the garibaldini • Emily Austin on what the dead leave behind • Judy Scott recalls summer in 1970s Hydra with Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen • Can small-scale organizing solve global problems? • How the Bush White House handled the AIDS epidemic at home and overseas • Lucy Jane Santos on radium, the most dangerous skincare ingredient of the early 20th century • What to do when your short story wants to be a novel • Legendary character actor Danny Trejo looks back at his time in prison • Kate Biberdorf breaks down the chemistry of your happy hour drink • On the deep humanity of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction • In praise of Alice Munro’s masterful endings (and Chekhov’s, too) • On the ecstasy—and agony—of running an ultramarathon in your seventies • Cai Chongda remembers coming of age on the coast of Taiwan • What makes Jewish literature “Jewish”? • How crafting got Kelly Williams Brown through the worst 700 days of her life 

The Best of Book Marks:

New titles by Becky Chambers, Matt Bell, Chuck Wendig, and more Sci-Fi and Fantasy books to help you escape the July heat • Strega Nona, Tender Is the Night, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and more rapid-fire book recs from Katie Crouch • The Asterix comics, Moby-Dick, the threesome in Dhalgren, and more rapid-fire book recs from Ben Ehrenreich • S. A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, Dana Spiotta’s Wayward, and Helen Scales’ The Brilliant Abyss all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

More from CrimeReads:

Reporter-turned-crime-writer Jackie Kabler thinks back on an unsettling encounter with a killer • Rachel Donohue with seven coming-of-age mysteries that capture “the oddness of the moment in question” • David Bell on the metatextual appeal of thrillers about thrillers • Andrew Nette on New Zealand’s “Jukebox Killer” and the Antipodean obsession with pulp fiction • Hilary Davidson with novels in which the dead help solve their own murders • Josephine Wilkinson on the 18th century’s greatest conspiracy theory: the Man in the Iron Mask • T.J. Newman on pushing through 41 rejections and getting some life-changing news • Carol Goodman on a forgotten Magdalen refuge in the heart of New York City • Samira Sedira on the overlooked racist motivations behind a horrifying crime • April Snellings with a brief introduction to the oeuvre of Paula Maxa, the original scream queen