Lit Hub Weekly: May 29 - June 1, 2018

• “In Lagos, she is as recognizable as the President. Her face is on billboards. People crowd around her at the airport.” Larissa Macfarquhar profiles Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. | The New Yorker
• “The sole criterion is, how does it move us? Does it pull us out of our everyday trot?” Rita Dove discusses her forthcoming tenure as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor. | CJR
• “She seems aware that scolding the conqueror is only another way of acknowledging his privileged position.” On the fictions of Chinese writer Eileen Chang. | The New York Review of Books
• A real-life book club goes to see Book Club, the new film starring Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen as book clubbers whose lives are turned upside down by Fifty Shades of Grey. | NPR
• Christine Smallwood on the legacy of John Updike’s Couples, “500 pages of people demonstrating again and again that they are incapable of turning down an invitation to a party at which they are guaranteed to have a bad time.” | Bookforum
• “The literary world does quite like the notion of genius, but it has no place for a Picasso.” Helen DeWitt on the unfinished and the unpublishable. | LARB
• Science confirms what you already knew: the psychological experience of owning print books is “significantly different” from that of of owning e-books—to the point that they should be considered completely different products. | Forbes
• “To be honest I was expecting it to sell about 500 copies and then I would quietly go back to my music.” A profile of French-Rwandan rapper turned novelist Gaël Faye, whose debut Small Country (named for one of his songs) has been translated into 35 language. | The New York Times
• “Poetry—which awakens our senses, frees us from the tyranny of literal meaning and assures us of the credible reality of emotional truth—puts us in touch with something bigger than language. . .” Read a speech delivered by Tracy K. Smith at the Library of Congress. | The Washington Post
• On the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, whose 1968 “Poem” has lately become “a vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment.” | The Paris Review
• “Even hearing his warm, patrician baritone—once described by a critic as ‘sandpaper and velvet’—over the phone feels like an experience worth paying for.” A profile of popular and prolific audiobook narrator Grover Gardner. | The Village Voice
• “Mastering a difficult task . . . is about relinquishing our ordinary selves, our ordinary world.” Josephine Livingstone on the memoir of a professional tree climber and the sublimity of climbing trees. | The New Republic
• “I felt transformed: I was not just the observer, I was the doer.” Jami Attenberg on solo travel and a last-minute trip to Guatemala. | AFAR
• “The whole business of collecting is a mysterious thing.” At the annual Antiquarian Booksellers Association Rare Books Fair with everyone’s favorite TV naturalist, David Attenborough. | The TLS
• People were using my name to provoke violence: How the fabricated death of an Indian journalist brought Kasganj to the brink of war. | Granta

Also on Lit Hub:

The ultimate summer 2018 books preview • After the parties, after the drinks: the tiny Venetian island where Hemingway went to write • From Star Wars to Lord of the Rings, how to build an entire fictional world • Every day, another language dies: Heather Altfeld offers a final farewell to words we’ll never hear again • Bradley Babendir isn’t crazy about being in nature, but sure loves reading about it • Darnell L. Moore on the unbearable whiteness of being at college • Anthony Burgess on Kubrick’s adaptationof A Clockwork Orange: “If [it] can corrupt us, why not Shakespeare or the Bible?” • Is this the year Norway’s greatest living writer becomes a household name in America? (Dag. Dag Solstad.) • When Walt Whitman’s poems were rejected for being too timely • How Rebekah Frumkin learned to write characters that made her feel less alone • Anxious, impatient, seasick, married: on the not-so-great start to Mary and Percy Shelley’s life together • “I never wanted to be an evil stepmother…” Danielle Teller no longer thinks of herself as an “entirely good person” • My day with Andy Warhol: David Searcy encounters an icon • “The language of self-denial is the first I ever learned.” Samantha Zighelboim on the poetics of fatness • Our favorite stories of the month: from babies to The Big Sleep, the best writing at Lit Hub this May

Best of Book Marks:

Tomb of the Unknown Racist author Blanche McCrary Boyd talks to Jane Ciabattari about Art Spiegelman’s Maus, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and more books for political activism • Oakland-based writer and critic Ismail Muhammad on Chester Himes’ seminal race-noir and Hilton Als’ criticism • Patricia Lockwood on Rachel Cusk, Alan Cumming on David Sedaris, Darryl Pinckney on Ta-Nehisi Coates, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week • The final installment of the Outline Trilogy, Michael Chabon’s essays on fatherhood, a new tale of suspense from Ruth Ware, and more all feature among our Best Reviewed Books of the Week

New on CrimeReads:

Levi Stahl on what he learned delving into Donald E. Westlake’s letters • Audiobook addict Beth Gutcheon surveys the very best in crime audiobooks • Tracy Clark on hard-boiled dames and growing up on the south side of Chicago • Why horror maestro Laird Barron thinks crime, noir, and horror aren’t so different • Find a few hours to escape with 10 of the greatest road trips in crime fiction • Lincoln Michel on literature’s greatest con artists • Adrienne Sharp remembers the dirty, run-down, trashy world of 1980s Vegas • From Condor to Luke Cage, 7 crime shows to watch this June • Michael Niemann investigates the political slant of stories of justice and restored order