Lit Hub Weekly: November 4 - 8, 2019

• On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Paul Vidich takes us through the fateful night that made history (that almost didn’t happen!). | Lit Hub Politics
• Susannah Cahalan on the time Nellie Bly committed herself to the infamous Blackwell Island Asylum just to get the story. | Lit Hub History
• Big Data vs. Big Dada: Benjamin Aleshire on (briefly) going corporate as a poet-for-hire at a tech conference. | Lit Hub Craft
• The critics’ verdicts on Benardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Carmen Maria Machado’s dream house, Flea’s wild man memoir, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• “The following books exist as vessels of terror, and I present them to you unabashedly.” Michael Seidlinger is happy to scare you, even though Halloween has passed. | CrimeReads
• “It was basically an early colonial version of Footloose.” On America’s very first banned book—turns out we’ve been doing this nonsense since 1637. | Atlas Obscura
• The White House is attempting to expose and intimidate the anonymous senior official who is soon to publish a tell-all book about the dysfunction of the Trump administration. | The Hill
• Is Oprah’s Book Club “the most culturally resonant part of her powerful legacy”? Reporter Jamilah King argues that African American reading experiences wouldn’t be the same without it. | Mother Jones
• “To describe the world more fully is to change it.” Elif Batuman revisits Edith Wharton’s (ever-current) The Age of Innocence. | The New York Times
• “It’s not as easy to describe as what I wrote in my apocalypse stories, to witness the incineration of a way of life.” Aja Gabel on the California wildfires and finding hope in the apocalypse. | Alta
• “The fact that we survived is a miracle to me. This is me making good on that miracle.” Tommy Pico on food, poetry, and cultural erasure. | Interview
• Appreciating Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life, the “compelling but unwieldy” book that eluded the Russian canon. | The Atlantic
• “This material is utterly unbearable today”: on the rise and fall of Booth Tarkington. | The New Yorker
• “Reading Ruskin, you begin to think that he more or less lived at the tip of his pencil, in the nib of his pen”: Verlyn Klinkenborg on the 19th-century polymath par excellence John Ruskin. | New York Review Daily
• “Science and literature alike are readers of the world. And, sooner or later, both lead us to the unreadable, the boundary at which the unintelligible begins.” Karl Ove Knausgaard on the slowness of literature and the problems of progress. | The New Yorker
• Romanticizing the wilderness can become “a poorly cloaked exercise in colonial nostalgia,” Alex Hutchinson writes. | New York Review of Books
• Novelist Ahmet Altan has been released from prison in Turkey, three years after his detention brought protests from writers and free speech advocates around the world. | The Bookseller
• A new history of women’s writing claims that the earliest works by women in English, typically dated to the late Middle Ages, can be found as far back as the 8th century. | The Guardian
• W.E.B. Du Bois’s infographics showed “the evolution of black life since emancipation.” | The New Yorker
• A Michigan woman faces up to 93 days in jail for… overdue library books. | New York Daily News

Also on Lit Hub:

Here are the 20 best works of nonfiction of the decade • Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo discusses the illusion of writers’ block • Rebecca Solnit on the unfounded self-importance (and self-pity!) of the richest of the rich • Timothy Denevi on the White House lawn, listening to Donald Trump mess up baseball cliches • Lindy West on breaking the silence around abortion • On stillness as a form of dissent, from Vietnam die-ins to Black Lives Matter to the occupying of public parks • Rock, pop, and the development of avant-garde music after World War II • Sherrod Brown traces the unlikely history of Desk 88, the locus for generations of American progressivism • Nancy Pelosi on looking to Eleanor Roosevelt for hope • Alan Moore on William Blake and the supernatural poetry of place • Nathan Scott McNamara on homesickness and displacement in the millennial memoir • Clémentine Goldszal navigates France’s fall publishing frenzy, aka “Oscar season for books” • Sarah Rose Cavanagh on how ghost stories spread in the era of social media • Connor Harrison on lessons from hauling his library across an ocean • Heather Christle’s patchwork approach to piecing together her book • In Trump Nation, a dress rehearsal for a civil war: Larry Siems revisits America, October 2016 • On Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and the “art of omission” • Mariana Enriquez, in praise of Silvina Ocampo • Mo Rocca on the struggle to depathologize homosexuality • Rosalie Knecht and Idra Novey discuss translation, writing tension, and literary “retrenchment” • What was it like to bake the royal wedding cake? • David Ulin on death, sci-fi, and scenes from La Jetée • Nine great novels of revelation and… research • Emma Sloley and Emily Raboteau in conversation about climate change • Anne Nelson pulls back the curtain on the 2018 midterms • Curtis White on the radically compassionate films of Ai Weiwei and Agnès Varda • Exotic pets, wild blood, and the search for human-animal connection at a reptile show • Lessons from pretending to be a pretentious lit bro for 5 years • Andy Serkis and the doubleness of the movie star • Liesl Schillinger on the eery similarities between the Impeachment of Donald Trump and the Indictment of George III • What does “NSFW” mean in the age of social media? • Remembering Stephen Dixon, two-time National Book Award finalist, who died Wednesday • Inside the early struggles of the women who built Disney • On Harriet Tubman’s final escape mission • On the work of anti-Nazi writer Hans Fallada, and the illusion of the apolitical • The impassioned world of Anaïs Nin’s diaries

Best of Book Marks:

Clockwork thieves, haunted islands, the return of Erin Morgenstern, and more of November’s best Sci-Fi and Fantasy books • Five NYC-set novels that became NYC-set films, from If Beale Street Could Talk to The Great Gatsby • Loving Anna Karenina, hating Madame Bovary, and more rapid-fire book recs from Esmé Weijun Wang • André Aciman’s Find Me: a keen portrait of relationships or impervious to actual feeling? • Carmen Maria’s Machado’s In the Dream House, Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

New on CrimeReads:

A conversation between spy novelists Joseph Kanon and Paul Vidich • Lisa Jewell looks at the literature of big houses with even bigger secrets • Legendary author and director Nicholas Meyer has published his first Holmes novel in 26 years and boy, is it relevant • Billy Bob Thornton and Noah Hawley on the making of Fargo • Hank Phillippi Ryan on the salacious crimes which inspired one of the earliest legal thrillers • Chad Zunker recommends six legal thrillers with heroes you can root for • Zach Vasquez on the most cathartic moments in the cinema of violence • All the true crime books you need to read this November • Paul French takes us on a global tour of true crime podcasts • Tori Eldridge on writing about ninjas without sacrificing truth and heart