Lit Hub Weekly: October 30 – November 3, 2017

• How Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, a satire of workplace sexual harassment, has come to read “like a work of credible realism.” | The New Yorker
• “The carnage in Walker’s work asks white people: What’s so pretty about you?” Darryl Pinckney on the artist Kara Walker. | The New York Review of Books
• Controlled confession. Strategic revelation: How the new Joan Didion documentary takes a few pages out of her own book. | The Atlantic
• “I hear Jimi Hendrix / Was also unsure in dance despite being beautiful.” A poem by Terrance Hayes. | New Republic
• “In 200, 300, or 400 years. . . it will be considered normal that somebody born in any part of the world has the same rights as someone born elsewhere.” An interview with Mohsin Hamid. | The Nation
• “We outsiders must take full possession of our demographic specificity and our collective rage to define ourselves, and therefore our country.” Antoinette Nwandu on reading Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider after Charlottesville. | LARB
• “Work . . . is a limitless fluid; it will flow into and fill every container, every life, if given the chance.” On three books about our era of overwork. | Literary Review of Canada
• “Paley’s humane braiding of love and politics offers a refreshing alternative to the impoverished vision presented by our most recent election cycle and its fallout.” Our own Jess Bergman on Grace Paley’s politicized compassion. | Full Stop
• “She was punishing herself and her charmed life, herself and her embarrassment of riches.” On the fiction of Mary McCarthy. | The Times Literary Supplement
• Lois’s Duncan’s Down a Dark Hall—a 1970s “parable of the terror of teenage girlhood”—has been updated for 2017, cell phones and all. | Jezebel
• “I started thinking about making it into a film when I was close to Grace’s age at the time of the murders, and now I’m almost the age Grace is at the end of the novel.”  Sarah Polley on adapting Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. | Vulture
• We need to “think about what we value in politics; how we think about the world and how we value the world, society, communities and ways of living—beyond just a kind of capital gain.” On the enduring relevance of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. | New Statesman
• “The decision to pursue music as a career proved a good one, but I was still curious about what we lost when he gave up writing fiction.” On Leonard Cohen’s literary career. | Hazlitt
• In defense of distraction and work that embraces it (Tristam Shandy, the poetry of John Ashbery, and more). | Poetry Magazine
• “Every generation wants to believe it’s the last, and yet doesn’t really want to believe this.” On the pleasures of imagining the end of the world, from The Shining to Fallout 4. | The Believer

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