Lit Hub Weekly: November 16 - 20, 2020

• “Art is made in the space between the artist and their early, chosen readers, a space that is filled with love.” Sheila Heti on the importance of finding your trusted readers. | Lit Hub Craft
• Rebecca Solnit: How are we supposed to meet half-way with people for whom belief trumps fact? | Lit Hub Politics
• “These coming weeks and months will be, for many, the saddest time of the year.” If the real doesn’t have you down, Simon Han has some unhappy holiday literature to get you across the finish line. | Lit Hub Reading List
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Barack Obama’s memoir, Michael Wolff on Evan Osnos’ Joe Biden biography, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
  
• Claire Douglas recommends five psychological thrillers set in isolated places. | CrimeReads
• “This is the thorniest nonfiction publishing challenge that I’ve ever seen.” How publishers are confronting the possibility of a Trump memoir. | The New York Times
• “There’s a righteous joy in their sex writing—even in dark or traumatic scenes—and a sense of conviction that seems the hard-won fruit of personal and political struggle.” On sex in contemporary fiction, from Garth Greenwell to Lidia Yuknavitch to Miranda Popkey to Raven Leilani. | The Point
• Historians have found around 200 first edition copies of Isaac Newton’s masterpiece, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a book once believed to be much rarer. | Live Science
• “Is it still cool to memorize a lot of stuff? Is there even a reason to memorize anything?” On Wikipedia, Jeopardy!, and the fate of the fact. | The New Yorker
• Thanks, Obama: the former president’s memoir is poised to save Christmas for lots of booksellers impacted by the pandemic. | The New York Times
• “Working on JR consumed my life . . . When it was all over, I cried.” Meet Nick Sullivan, the audiobook narrator who tackled William Gaddis’ enormous, dialogue-filled, “unreadable” masterpiece, and lived to tell about it. | The Guardian
• Take a tour of Octavia Butler’s life in books and the local libraries that supported her. | Los Angeles Times
• “Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me.” Daniel Mendelson on what Trump can learn from the biggest losers in literature and history. | Town & Country
• After 50 years,“the great white whale of science fiction”—an anthology of works by major names edited by Harlan Ellison—is finally going to be published. | The Guardian
• “I needed to write a book that was a snapshot in time, but that was also a fair appraisal of what my life had been like and what it feels like for a child of immigrants.” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on the difficulties of writing about migration. | CNN
• “There’s no such thing as lost steps!” Matthew Beaumont on André Breton and the politics and poetics of walking in the city. | The Paris Review
• “I think we actually sabotage our own happiness with this unrestrained anger.” Read a profile of Loretta J. Ross, whose Smith College course on White Supremacy in the Age of Trump teaches students to call people in instead of calling them out. | The New York Times
• Read beyond Hillbilly Elegy with these stories of the American working class. | Los Angeles Times
• Can’t stop watching The Crown? These books are a great starting place for more on the Windsors. | Washington Post

Also on Lit Hub:

Talking to Phillip Lopate about what makes a great American essay • Brianna Zimmerman on protest, the post office, and the politics of joy • The Center for Fiction First Novel prize finalists on the books that won their young hearts • Betsy Bonner talks to Jeannie Vanasco about the infinite aftershocks of family tragedy • Dinty Moore on the rise of flash nonfiction • Peter Frampton talks fame, David Bowie, and The Simpsons, with Dan Sheehan • On the lost digital poems (and erotica) of William H. Dickey • How Woody Guthrie’s mother shaped his music of the downtrodden • On the mysterious celebrity miracle worker of postwar Germany • Michael Rabagliati draws the rise and fall of a 30-year relationship, one panel at a time • Government security clearance isn’t always great for your writing career • “Who wants to be the guy who paralyzes Michael J. Fox?” Who indeed • Alex Lockwood on his syllabus from non-white and non-cis writers • Dubravka Ugrešić wonders if “democracy” has lost all meaning • Jorge Carrion’s ode to bookstores couldn’t come at a better time • Why Harry Houdini did not like Arthur Conan Doyle • Timothy Denevi, among American brown shirts in the capital • Jehad al-Saftawi documents the dangers of working as a journalist in Gaza • The Guerilla Girls: “It’s an outrage that museums in a wealthy country like the US must rely on billionaires to exist” • On the suppression of Rotwelsch, the lost language of Central Europe • Bill T. Jones on the uneasy liaison between storyteller and listener • Alyssa Pelish on “The Final Girl, the lone female character in a slasher movie who manages to survive” • Doon Arbus talks to Francine Prose about the question that eventually confronts all writers

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

C.J. Box on Big Sky, big twists, and bringing his beloved Montana characters to the screen • The CrimeReads staff recommends November’s best international crime fiction • Abby Endler of Crime by the Book talks love and murder with Jo Nesbø • Why odd couples and opposites make for great mystery fiction, from S.M. Goodwin • Crime and the City heads to Mexico City, a sprawling city with a rich tradition in mystery and crime fiction • 40 years after Jonestown, Courtney Summers reflects on the difficulty of writing about cults and the people who join them • Otto Penzler traces the evolution of espionage fiction • Erin Lindsay would like to remind you that Teddy Roosevelt hung with the wildest lawmen of the Old West • Les Standiford explores the history of crime writing in Miami • Matthew Deandra mourns his mother, Orania Papazoglou, who wrote as Jane Haddam