Lit Hub Weekly: October 22 - 26, 2018

• “I want to be seen as someone who is always concerned with making space for everyone to play their part”: a profile of the polymathic Eve Ewing. | The New York Times
• Kaitlyn Greenidge interviews the doulas fighting on the frontlines against the black maternal health crisis. | Lenny
• “Baldwin and Coetzee crossed the ocean in different directions. Yet they were fleeing from societies that were very similar.” What James Baldwin and J. M. Coetzee can teach us about history and home. | The Offing
• How do we know what we know about the past? Alex Carp on Jill Lepore’s monumental new volume on the history of the United States. | NYRB
• From the archives: listen to a recording of Susan Sontag delivering her “Illness as Metaphor” lecture in 1977. | NYIH
• Think the Trump-Russia scandal sounds like the seedy plot of a political thriller? You’re not alone. Five crime novelists imagine possible outcomes for Trump. | The New York Times
• Leslie Feinberg, Akwaeke Emezi, Andrea Lawlor, Jordy Rosenberg: toward creating a trans literary canon. | The Paris Review
• Jeff Jackson offers seven contenders for the Great American Rock and Roll Novel. | Electric Literature
• “The bank is gone, and so, too, the old Academy Cinema, which was once the Antient Concert Rooms, where Joyce sang.” Take the Colm Tóibín tour of Dublin from the comfort of your home. | The Irish Times
• “Mama Bunny, Mama Robin and Mama Bear seem destined to stand on the doorstep waving handkerchiefs in their husbands’ dust.” On the trouble with parents in children’s books. | The Washington Post
• Are translators untouchable? Tim Parks on the delicate art of reviewing translations. | New York Review of Books
• “I like things that give me the creeps.” Hermione Hoby profiles Shelley Jackson. | The New Yorker
• Jill Lepore on the Supreme Court, women in history textbooks, and our current “epistemological crisis”. | JSTOR
• In an excerpt from Glory Edim’s anthology Well-Read Black Girl, Kaitlyn Greenidge lists 10 books every black woman should read. | BuzzFeed
• “I’m really interested in redefining what a poet is, so why not try and break poetry’s rules as much as possible.” Read an interview with Eileen Myles. | The Creative Independent
• “Sunblock, chap-stick, the works of Proust, antidepressants, and flares.” When John Ashbery revealed his (very practical) desert island objects in a Q&A with high school students. | Best American Poetry

Also on Lit Hub:

Lev Grossman on fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons, lost worlds, and the “strange narcotic power” of fictional maps • The psychiatrist who tried to save Sylvia Plath • “Mother is a political category, and it is also a symbolic category”: five writers on what it means to write about motherhood • The One Where Homophobia and Representation Coexisted: On Friends and the slow mainstreaming of gay life on TV • Not only does Edward Carey write the characters in his novel, he also renders them in wood, wax, graphite, and clay • RJ Young visits the dark heart of an American gun show to buy his very first gun • Veronica Scott Esposito on the catastrophic consequences of trans erasure • On the vulnerable private writings of Ernest Hemingway •Patrick Modiano on the night he (or someone like him) fled a Parisian crime scene • On Puerto Rican nationhood, after Hurricane María • When Byron, Shelley, Godwin, and Polidori created the first literary vampire and freaked themselves right out •  On science-fiction’s long-standing, so-far-unrequited love of Mars • Are you misusing these commonly confused words? Click here to find out how embarrassed you should be! • Joshua Rivkin on the painting that took Cy Twombly 22 years to finish • Continuing our books that defined the decade: the 10 books that defined the 1950s; the 1960s; Here’s the 1970s; the ’80s; and the 10 books that defined the ’90s

Best of Book Marks:

From J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World to N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, 10 Cli-Fi Novels for the Dark Days Ahead • Marion Winik, the author of The Baltimore Book of the Dead, spoke to Jane Ciabattari about five books of the dead • This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: J. Howard Rosier on Heart of Darkness, Marcia Douglas, and The Last Samurai • Reviews of every collection on the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist, one of the world’s most prestigious poetry awards • John Banville on Anthony Powell, Meg Wolitzer on Barbara Kingsolver, Tommy Orange on Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and more Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week • New titles from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Daisy Johnson, Frederick Forsyth, and more in the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

New on CrimeReads:

8 great horror podcasts and their most chilling episodes • Erica Wright looks at 9 “investigators” who challenge and expand our ideas of what a crime fighter should be • We rounded up (almost) all of 2018’s new additions to the Sherlockian canon •  On fairy tales, horror, and what we’re getting out of all those serial killer novels • “Lawyers are confronted with big conflicts, and often great suffering, and these naturally lead to great stories.” An interview with John Grisham • Catriona McPherson looks at the many kinds of mothering we encounter in crime fiction • Jeff Abbott on the pain of losing his library to a house fire, how to go about rebuilding, and lessons for future preservation • “Nobody wrote scoundrels the way Ross Thomas could.” Neil Nyren breaks down the life and work of a master • A second novel should be just as celebrated as a first.Rounding up the rising stars of mystery in our list of fall’s best sophomore crime • “This was Chicago. All of it.” Julie Hyzy on the joys and necessities of writing about Chicago after a lifetime living there • Emma Viskic looks at a new trend in Australian crime fiction: crime in a small-town setting • Young adult novelist Amy Giles on why we shouldn’t shy away from hard discussions in teen fiction, and how fiction can help process the trauma of school shootings • From ex-sanguination to ghost-related mortgage fraud, Robert Masellorecommends six classics with supernatural crimes at their center • The art of the inglourious demise: Cecilia Ruiz takes us through four untimely deaths caused by inanimate objects, from murder by cactus to death by coffin collapse • “I think we look to discover things about ourselves, or even change them, through other people’s stories.” Sarah Meuleman talks mysteries, biographies, and vanishing authors