Lit Hub Weekly: October 23 – 27, 2017

• Marilynne Robinson on the value of the humanities, “those aptly named disciplines that make us consider what human beings have been, and are, and will be. Sometimes I think they should be renamed Big Data.” | New York Review of Books
• “The fraught discovery of the joy, the misery, the awe of making oneself vulnerable to passion was permanently sealed into the continued rereading of a great novel.” Vivian Gornick on coming of age with D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. | Harper’s
• “Many residents will never return to the lives they had before the fires, but will find new capacities in themselves and new possibilities and roles in their communities.” Rebecca Solnit on the aftermath of the California wildfires. | The New Yorker
• “What Wenner understood clearly from the start was that rock and roll was about sex.” An excerpt from Sticky Fingers, a new biography about Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner. | Vulture
• On the post-Trump rise of erasure poetry, a form which “can mimic the violence of the state” but also “symbolically restore a voice to the silenced.” | The New Republic
• “Her mother’s abandonment seemed to have given Marnie access inside a whole carnival tent of unwanted discoveries.” Short fiction by Alissa Nutting. | BuzzFeed Reader
• A reading list of books that have helped Claire Vaye Watkins through the hellscape of 2017. | The Rumpus
• “Here, every morning, they began the day by talking to their dead children, weeping love and apology, as unselfconsciously as if they were speaking over a long-distance telephone line.” An excerpt from Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami. | Longreads
• Angela Flournoy and Issa Rae are developing a new drama for HBO—and like all great shows, it’s set in the ‘90s. | Deadline
• One weird trick to help eliminate crushing ennui: Gabriella Paiella on the calming effect of A Pattern Language, a radical architecture book from 1977. | The Cut
• “I didn’t know what else to do. So I do what I always do, I wrote something.” An interview with Suzan-Lori Parks, who wrote a play for each of the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency. | American Theatre
• His ’n’ hers guinea pigs in a harrowing experiment: Rumaan Alam and Emily Gould team up to investigate a selection of clothing subscription services. | The New York Times
• Rediscovering the Russian equivalent to the Brontës (sans the posthumous fame), the Khvoshchinskaya sisters. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Colin Kaepernick has signed a million-dollar book deal with Random House’s OneWorld imprint. | Page Six
• There’s an anonymous high-profile book editor consulting on Lifetime’s publishing-centric Younger. But who could it be? | Vogue

Also on Lit Hub: 

Writing advice distilled from dozens of conversations with over 150 authors · 8 delusions of western democracy we could do without · George Orwell, Ayn Rand, and other writers who injured themselves while writing · From a bar called Bukowski’s to America’s oldest poetry bookstore, how to spend a literary long weekend in Boston · The graduate research paper that helped solve a century-old crime ·  How Kate Tempest makes “radical empathy” more than just a buzzword · A pilgrimage to the Book of Kells, the most famous manuscript in the world · How the oldest stories can give us the best perspective: On the slow time of classic literature · From Greene to le Carré to Putin v. Trump, Cold War stories are still in the air: A Cold War Noir reading list · Autumn has always been poets’ season: Nietzsche, Emerson, and the eternal return of falling leaves