Lit Hub Weekly: October 15 - 18, 2019

• When we talk about “surviving,” who is “we”? Rebecca Solnit on life under the first thousand days of Trump. | Lit Hub Politics
• Please (quietly) enjoy this ranking of 50 fictional librarians.| Lit Hub Film and TV
• Demystifying the writer’s fear of failure: Sarah Labrie on why writing is supposed to be difficult. | Lit Hub Craft
• Elton John’s hilariously self-lacerating memoir, a new biography of Thomas Edison, a lyrical indictment of the carceral industrial state, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• “The Twilight Zone,” the Sanderson sisters, and tons of Sarah Michelle Gellar: the CrimeReads, LitHub, and Book Marks staffers round up our favorite things to watch/read/eat in October. | CrimeReads
• Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo have been named the joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize. And here’s a joint profile fo them. | BBC, The Guardian
• “The choice of Mr. Handke implies a concept of literature safe from the infelicities of history and actualities of human life and death.” Aleksandar Hemon on Peter Handke, “the Bob Dylan of genocide apologists.” | The New York Times
• Who decides which books are “great,” anyway? | JSTOR
• John Banville speaks with John le Carré about spying (duh), English patriotism, and le Carré’s new novel—his 25th. | The Guardian
• “Why does such an amazing writer have so much bad sex?” An examination of Murakami’s blind spot. | Metropolis Japan
• After reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, Helen Joyce took a psychedelic retreat. | New York Review of Books
• Dublin city officials have proposed a plan to repatriate James Joyce’s remains. | The Guardian
• “We need to use the language of crisis.” Four storytellers on writing about climate change. | Guernica
• A reading list from legendary rapper (and literacy advocate) Talib Kweli, who briefly resurrected Brooklyn’s first black-owned bookstore at an October arts festival. | Document Journal
• Best-selling literary critic Harold Bloom, a controversial advocate of the Western canon, has died at 89. | The Hub
• Have we, as humans, been getting happier or sadder? A sentiment analysis program has analyzed the last 200 years of literature in an attempt to find out. | Vox
• “I start by writing a brief, extremely dull short story.” Charles Finch on how to build a good mystery plot. | Vulture
• “It’s censorship, plain and simple.” Someone is hiding the left-leaning books at an Idaho library. | Associated Press
• “We were led to believe it was a book prize, not a career prize.”: One of this year’s Booker Prize judges, Afua Hirsch, seemed to imply that Margaret Atwood’s “titanic career” played a part in her win this year. | The Telegraph
• “We can’t let our work be driven by the anxieties around narrative scarcity.” Viet Thanh Nguyen on writing The Sympathizer. | The Millions

Also on Lit Hub:

Here are our takes on the best poetry collections of the past decade • Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter’s friendship in letters • The late Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian’s place in the American canon • How do we preserve the vanishing foods of the earth? • Elizabeth Strout spills her literary secrets •  Bill Bryson on the mysterious history of bipedalism • It’s the Ben Lerner–Ocean Vuong conversation you hadn’t realized you needed! • Iris Origo on the impossibility of capturing truth in a biography • Deborah Levy beats writers’ block with a good swim • Tim O’Brien on the scars of war and the bonds of Vietnam • Chloe Vassot on the little-known “slow fire” that’s destroying all our books • Elizabeth DeNoma recommends a dozen great books from Scandinavia • Johan Harstad finds something in the trash • A poem by Sharon Olds from the collection Arias • How Anna Maxymiw’s unusual schedule saved her writing • On the film that brought the birthplace of Chicago blues alive • Leah Vernon: a day in the life of a fat model • Oscar Villalon on the many ghosts we call family • Cyrus Grace Dunham on why we need to explode the genre binary • Reginald Dwayne Betts on basketball, a most democratic sport • The Hungarian author who foresaw the future of nationalism • Murder in the Galapagos: the strange tale of the baroness and the bohemians • Meme but not forgotten: RIP to all the glorious animals memorialized in our digital hearts • Meaghan Winter on the importance of state versus federal politics • The role of librarians in a historical age of obsession

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

Craig Pittman on the Miami noir of Charles Willeford • Brenna Ehrlich on reading Liane Moriarty in the suburbs • Paddy Hirsch on fear of fire in Old New York City • J. Kingston Pierce on nine crime novels set during disasters • Max Booth III recommends 10 novels that prove comedy and supernatural fiction go together like vampire teeth and karo syrup • John Connolly speaks up in defense of supernatural crime fiction • Kim Liggett reveals the misogyny underpinning William Golding’s Lord of the Flies • Did Hill Street Blues rip off Ed McBain’s 87th precinct series?  • Thomas Pluck talks with Joyce Carol Oates about Marilyn Monroe, crime fiction, and cats • Lynne Truss gives a stirring defense of Brighton as a new literary capital