Lit Hub Weekly: June 3 - 7, 2024

• Gina Frangello considers her personal history in relation to The Neapolitan Quartet: “To love Ferrante…was almost akin to a secret handshake in certain bookish, feminist circles.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• Corey Mead on the slave labor that built the White House: “Despite how grueling and essential their labor was, virtually nothing is known about these hundreds of men beyond their first names.” | Lit Hub History
• “Longevity is the only indicator of literature that really matters, and this book is built to last.” Nick Hornby remembers his friend, Melissa Bank, and her work. | Lit Hub 
• Catherine Gigante-Brown on reading Jane Kamensky’s biography of her friend, Candida Royalle: “Candice was feminist American history.” | Lit Hub Memoir
• Feisal G. Mohamed looks at the history of Palestinian solidarity and the power of encampment as a form of protest. | The Yale Review
• “While some of the winners and finalists are undoubtedly phenomenal works, the lists from which they are drawn inevitably include between their lines the potential for alternative literary histories.” Viet Thanh Nguyen looks back at the first National Book Awards. | The Washington Post
• On reading the complex and controversial writer Sui Sin Far through the lens of sentimental fiction. | JSTOR Daily
• What does it actually mean to be Kafkaesque? Whatever it means, it’s ubiquitous. | The Guardian
• Climate scientists are examining nineteenth century whaling logbooks to learn about shifts in global wind patterns. | Smithsonian Magazine
• “The UC system’s unionized graduate workers, postdocs, and researchers are now on strike over the events of April 30 and May 1…” School might be out, but solidarity actions at universities continue. | Jacobin
• “Her willingness to try on different disguises, different genres, different genders, and different voices is a mark of her courage and her curiosity.” Emily Wilson on Anne Carson. | The Nation
• Rachel Poser profiles Ibram X. Kendi, four years after 2020’s racial reckoning. | The New York Times Magazine
• “For if the modern cat knew its name and could ask for food when hungry, who was to say that, when your back was turned, it wasn’t gossiping about you?” On the history of talking cats in literature. | New York Review of Books
• On Keanu Reeves and China Miéville’s unlikely comic book collaboration. | Wired
• “Perhaps formality… is simply a symptom of a writer seeing depth and gesturing toward it, but not really plumbing it, which would be messy, and uncertain, and risky.” Lucy Schiller considers linguistic expansion. | The Paris Review
• “For six hours the police interrogated her about her academic articles and public statements she had made since October 7.” Palestinian students and academics in Israel are facing unprecedented penalties for speaking out. | New York Review of Books
• On Rachel Cusk and “the ontological potential of an artistic object as a literary device.” | 3:AM
• Mike Duncan revisits Edward Gibbon’s masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. | The New Republic

Also on Lit Hub:

Recent crackdowns against academic dissent, at home and in Gaza • Is the lonely reader really lonely? • Stephen Vladeck on the demoralizing ethics of the Supreme Court • Did medieval people care about their birth charts? • Jane Ciabattari talks to Morgan Talty • Lucy Sante, Tom Lee, and more remember Arthur Russell’s disco classic, “Is It All Over My Face?” • Julie Satow on the early career of Geraldine Stutz • Christiana Spens on “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens.” • Amy Kurtzweil on mourning during a time of global grief • Overcoming shared helplessness and working towards liberation in Palestine and beyond • In praise of Carl Sagan, iconic pothead • Peyton Marshall considers the virtues of slow writing • On working in the 21st century • The ethics and complexities of writing about your own children • Garrett M. Graff examines the first hours of D-Day on its 80th anniversary • Why don’t books have full credit pages like movies and TV? • Kyle Dillon Hertz on Laura van den Berg’s The Isle of Youth • What does Furiosa add to the Mad Max universe? • Claire Kilroy on the unpaid labor of motherhood and writing • Diana Arterian walks you through the books on Morgan Talty’s nightstand • Leslie Jamison, Rumaan Alam, and more tackle writer’s block • Ten debut LGBTQ+ authors on the books that shaped them as writers • Lisa Liebman talks to Griffin Dunne about family tragedy and Joan Didion’s parties • John Kaag on the Bloods, the little-known dynasty that shaped American life • How Eva Le Gallienne revolutionized early 20th-Century theater • Queen Christina, lesbian icon