Lit Hub Weekly: May 20 - 24, 2024

• She cooked like she lived and filmed, with feeling.” Pulitzer-Prize winner Ilyon Woo on the craft lessons she learned from the late filmmaker Dai Sil Kim Gibson. | Lit Hub Craft
• Want to be a writer? Ursula K. Le Guin has some *very* simple advice for you. | Lit Hub Craft
• Should you let your family read your memoir before it’s published? Lilly Dancyger makes the case for yes. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Is a JPEG just a JPEG? Zachary Small explores the intersection of new technologies, financial speculation and artistic creation. | Lit Hub Art
• “I’ve never reported on the police before, and I had never felt so close to the possibility of violence. It was chilling.” Six student journalists at Columbia discuss what they’ve learned while covering the protests. | The Nation

• How Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker created the “lovingly defiant” children’s book An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. | Harper’s Bazaar
• “In a rare, somewhat lengthy glimpse at how Sonic Youth worked around the time of their 1992 album Dirty, Moore describes an essentially collaborative process with his bandmates.” On what Thurston Moore’s new memoir adds to a fan’s understanding of Sonic Youth. | Public Books
• On (not) reading: Anthony Lane explores the rise of book-abbreviation apps. | The New Yorker
• “To read Roy’s early nonfiction is to be astonished by her prescience about the situation in which India finds itself now.” Yogita Goyal on reading Arundhati Roy in the present. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Celebrity book clubs are having a moment. Here’s a deep dive into Reese Witherspoon’s. | The New York Times
• Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale discuss Stepanova’s collection Holy Winter 20/21, which Dugdale translated. | poets.org
• Ross Barkan on the life and times of Jimmy Breslin: “There is really no such thing as a big-city newspaper columnist anymore, but Breslin was big—he would literally call reporters on the phone to tell them, ‘I’m big.’” | The Point
• Accra Shepp shares photographs from Columbia’s solidarity encampment. | New York Review of Books
• Revisiting Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and what it can teach us about the differences between informing and truth-telling. | Dissent
• “In truth, being called on to draft a eulogy is the closest I’ve ever felt to my craft being an act of service.” Comedian and speechwriter Chandler Dean on how to craft a eulogy. | McSweeney’s
• Silvana Paternostro traces One Hundred Years of Solitude’s long path from page to screen. | Vanity Fair
• “I think I’m old enough now to write a love story because I’m out of danger.” Jenny Erpenbeck on Kairos. | The Guardian
• Paige Williams reports on how Minneapolis librarians are working to reimagine how public libraries work with homeless patrons and function as public spaces. | The New Yorker
• The book to cinema pipeline isn’t a simple one-way street. On the history and practice of novelizing movies. | The Baffler

Also on Lit Hub:

Leah Hager Cohen on following literary instinct • Nancy Miller Gomez on the origin and evolution of an obsession with collecting •  How the search for an image became an exploration of artist Red Grooms’ sculpted bookstore  • The impact and legacy of Pearl S. Buck’s memoir, The Child Who Never Grew • Wendy Chen on generation poems and the stories hidden in names • Sean Minogue praises the art of the long conversation in film • The writers who create literary puzzles and the readers who solve them • How do authors get famous? • Jessie Gaynor on rereading The Corrections while navigating her mother’s Parkinson’s • In praise of quietly unlikeable women • The difficulty of categorizing contemporary African American literature • Kevin Kwan on his favorite classics • How differing national visions divided the North and the South • Jane Ciabattari talks to R.O. Kwon • On the Slovenian verse of Tomaž Šalamun • These maps will help you find the humor in your day • How does Miranda July decide what to read? • Can you find one intelligent man that would prefer slavery? • An Appalachian family’s long tradition of unreliable narrators and morally grey characters • How residencies and new routines can rewire your brain • What’s on Zoë Bossiere’s nightstand? • The problem with comp titles • What gambling has to remind us about the art of statistics • Gender discrimination and Walmart’s labor practices • Books on jazz in honor of Duke Ellington • Illia Ponomarenko on how Ukraine confronted the looming threat of war • How James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others embraced a new Black humanism • Why crowdfunding isn’t a solution for those who struggle to pay for necessary healthcare • Read Samer Abu Hawwash’s poem “The Final City.,” translated by Huda Fakhreddine