Lit Hub Weekly: May 8–12, 2023

• Jennifer Banks considers the moral and political failure to “meet mothers with the full force of our intellects.” | Lit Hub History

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• Tracing the evolution of celebrity memoirs, from Charles Lindbergh to Will Smith. | Lit Hub

• On Frankenstein’s complicated relationship with science. | Lit Hub 

• John N. Maclean considers Ernest Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, “a luminous fishing tale and unsolved mystery.” | Lit Hub Criticism

• Tom Hanks’ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s Retrospective, and Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

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• Eight thrillers that take place over three days or less. | CrimeReads

• “To tell stories, you need storytellers. But the studios don’t necessarily see it that way.” A look back at the impact of the 2007 writers’ strike. | The Ringer

• Historian Ned Blackhawk is recalibrating the way Americans understand Native history. | The Guardian

• “It is a protest against a proposed totalitarian takeover of a democracy, let’s not call it anything else.” Margaret Atwood weighs in on recent protests in Israel against so-called reforms to the judiciary. | The Times of Israel

• Do great actors make great novelists? Esquire asks a question that we know the answer to. | Esquire

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• Maggie Tokuda-Hall speaks to The New York Times about refusing to remove racism references from her children’s book. | The New York Times

• Can we interest you in some fine literary gossip? | The Spinoff

• On the 90th anniversary of Germany’s book burnings. | Publishing Perspectives

• “Science fiction and fantasy are providing an oasis for young readers craving LGBTQ characters.” On finding safe queer spaces in a world of shootings and book bans. | The Hill

• Erin Maglaque examines the work of Lauren Berlant: How did women come to believe that their emotional lives were contiguous, already known to one another, when, as Berlant writes, ‘aloneness is one of the affective experiences of being collectively, structurally unprivileged?’” | The London Review of Books

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• Paying respects to Heather “Dooce” Armstrong, one of the original mommy bloggers. | The Cut

• In Sierra Leone, improving maternal health through storytelling. | LARB

• On the oldest and most boring form of trutherism: doubting Shakespeare’s identity. | Slate

• Are medical mysteries the new true crime? | The New Republic

• You want to sell books? Simply confuse the hell out of Taylor Swift fans. | The Washington Post

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• Dudes are reading more romance novels these days. | Wall Street Journal

Also on Lit Hub:

What Bruce Springsteen learned from Flannery O’Connor • Read from Mona Awad’s forthcoming novel, Rouge, on the intersection of beauty, power, and motherhood • What Shakespeare can teach us about writing horror • A look back at the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction in the 21st century • Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu on navigating American racism as an African immigrant • Writing about Hannie Schaft, a Dutch resistance fighter during WWII • Nasser Al-Dhafiri on rebuilding his personal library • Kelly McMasters on starting a bookstore to save her marriage • Connie Wang revisits an outing to Magic Mike Live… with her mom • Fae Myenne Ng on the blurred boundaries between memory and story • Ada Zhang on the complexity of capturing immigrants’ lives in fiction • Who was the only sitting president to contribute to a literary journal? • On long Covid and Descartes’ destructive influence on medicine • How the Cultural Revolution played society against itself • Adam Hart looks at our shared history with predators • How a 1980s concert brought Nelson Mandela new fame • Charles Yu reflects on Jeff Vandermeer’s powerfully weird first novel • Ben Okri proposes new visions for our collective future • How to write about your mother