Lit Hub Weekly: November 6-10, 2023

• Read rapid-fire interviews with (almost) all the finalists for the 2023 National Book Award, before next week’s ceremony. | Lit Hub

• Bumping Pollock off his pedestal: Turns out, drip painting was actually invented by a Ukrainian grandmother. | Lit Hub Art

• How American critics established Jane Austen’s global reputation. | Lit Hub

• Is twinship the ideal relationship? Helena de Bres investigates. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Vanessa Lillie interviews Native booksellers about their picks for Native American Heritage Month. | CrimeReads

• Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, and Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• “I hope to at least find a copy of my own poetry book, maybe near my neighbor’s olive tree, but there is nothing but debris. Nothing but the smell of explosions.” Mosab Abu Toha on living under siege. | The New Yorker

• “Has the self/ ever been the subject/ of so much propaganda?” A poem by Fady Joudah. | New York Times

• A brief history of book theft. | JSTOR Daily

• “You can burn books, put their authors in prison, ban them or confiscate them. But tearing pages out is a punishment so nasty no one’s thought of it yet.” Ahmed Naji on the power of a prison library. | The Washington Post

• Some good news: Efforts to ban books are backfiring. | 13WHAM

• “Most of his evaluations on his trip are superficial or banal or laughably snotty. What intrigues is how quickly he demands that things make sense.” Vivian Gornick on Camus’s begrudging book tour. | NYRB

• Sigrid Nunez recommends some of her favorite books. | Elle

• “What I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilisation, and in a culture war it may be that artists of all sorts can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.” Salman Rushdie on peace, freedom, myth, and Barbenheimer. | The Guardian

• Predicting the National Book Awards… with data. | Public Books

• “Jewish security, liberty, and dignity will not be achieved by pulverizing Palestinian buildings, individuals, and social structures.” Read Peter Cole’s response to the Israel-Hamas war. | The Yale Review

• James D. White explores the legacy of Alexander Bogdanov, Russian revolutionary and sci-fi pioneer. | Jacobin

• Ben Ehrenreich talks to Gazan writer Asmaa al-Ghoul about her life and work, and her campaign to end the Israeli assault on Gaza. | Verso

• Don’t quit your day job (seriously): Kate Dwyer digs into the state of authors’ finances. | Esquire

• “Humanity has already passed the last off-ramp for a vast number of species, and it’s a lot harder to imagine how we get back to stable ground. So what do we tell our kids?” Aaron Regunberg on reading children’s books in an age of mass extinction. | The New Republic

• The feminist website Jezebel has been shuttered by G/O Media after 16 years of operation. | Nieman Lab

Also on Lit Hub:

Sigrid Nunez on writing a pandemic novel • Tracy K. Smith reveals her writing routine • How Stephanie Land wrote her latest memoir in a month • Diane Seuss explains the creative process behind the poem that matters most to her • Why Naoise Dolan learned Italian for her book tour • Jeremy Eichler on art, music, and the humanist spirit in the face of Nazi atrocities • What Marabou storks can teach us about thriving during apocalypse • Alice Sparberg Alexiou recounts her odyssey in search of a long-lost relative • On the lifesaving potential of Latin American passports in the Warsaw ghetto • Virginia Pye on the confidence it takes to write • What does “community” really mean? • Where fiction ends and reality begins • Why Lindsay Hunter loves true crime • What to do when you get your period… in space • Exploring the world’s richest source of lithium • Grace Elizabeth Hale reckons with the dark underbelly of cherished family story • A brief history of onions in America • What Joseph Stalin ate • A roundtable on immigrant farmwork, exploitation, and finding literary authenticity • Reclaiming freedom for feminism • How writing made us human • The bloody final days of the Dalton Gang • Why there should be more books about breakups