Lit Hub Weekly: September 23 - 27, 2024

• Isabella Hammad recommends essential books about Palestine, featuring work by Jean Genet, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Who was Harriet Martineau? “A shocking number of advances in Anglo-American culture—everything from realist fiction to ecology to economic policy—would look different, or might not even exist, if she’d never put pen to paper.” | Lit Hub Biography
• On espionage, World War II, and why everything you think you know about spies is probably wrong. | Lit Hub History
• Jedediah Berry on improvisation, spontaneity, and what writers can learn from playing Dungeons & Dragons. | Lit Hub Craft
• Kasey Butcher Santana considers the marginalia of prison library books. | Split Lip
• “Somewhat unwillingly, Rooney has become an emblem of a (perhaps imaginary) millennial ethos, one in which that generation’s anticapitalist beliefs sit uneasily alongside its quiet but determined pursuit of a conventional life…that appears to be vanishing.” Andrea Long Chu on Sally Rooney. | Vulture
• On Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity and how technology has repositioned literature in the cultural zeitgeist. | 3AM
• Considering the movement for Palestine as student protesters return to campus. | n+1
• Esther Perel interviews Miranda July: “It doesn’t take very much reality to make something come alive. It’s like red food coloring or something — you just need a little drop, and suddenly the whole thing is pink.” | The Cut
• From Gender Queer to This One Summer, Gina Gagliano examines the state of comics amid wave after wave of book bans. | The Comics Journal
• Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about reporting on bans of his own book, Between the World and Me. | Vanity Fair
• “I had hoped that travel would make my world seem larger, but I felt like it had clipped my wings.” Mosab Abu Toha on the pain of traveling while Palestinian. | The New Yorker
• “In its ideal form, nightlife, clubbing, is about care: a set of stated and unstated hopes and aspirations about community and community-making.” On the Bushwick club scene and Emily Witt’s Health and Safety: A Breakdown. | The Nation
• Make love, not war: Matthew Wills on the pacifist, anarchist politics of The Joy of Sex author Alex Comfort. | JSTOR Daily
• Dennis Wilson Wise examines and revisits questions of Tolkien criticism. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Emma Spector considers the unbearable lightness of being (a Sally Rooney character). | Vogue
• Is The Power Broker the hottest new TikTok trend? | The Washington Post
• “Back then, she rode motorcycles and ran barefoot on the beach, climbed mountains and welded steel sculptures—despite pain and exhaustion that had started in her teens.” Sarah Leavitt on hearing her partner’s voice after death. | Oprah Daily
• “Krauss’s books were never didactic, and her interest was less in moralistic instruction than in the texture of imagination.” Adrienne Raphel revisits the children’s literature of Ruth Krauss. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub:

The literary and cinematic legacy of white supremacy • How Jack London’s The Iron Heel foresaw a future in opposition to democracy • A fall book flow chart • Puccini, Chinese operas, and tragedy in art and life • Stillness and silence in all seasons • How do you deal with post-book blues? • How America’s gun violence epidemic affects us all • In praise of over-the-top romance •  Olga Tokarczuk in conversation with translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones • On why bats are companions and protectors • Jane Ciabattari talks to Richard Powers • 10 great books with strong tween characters • How racism gutted public housing and built the American suburb • Why Earth’s survival depends on all of us • Oliver Radclyffe didn’t know he was writing a trans memoir • A daughter on her mother’s wish to die with dignity • The philosophy and practice of Claude Monet • What a growing global labor can learn from Cold War-era failures • Why humanity (probably) won’t be fighting wars against robots • Isabella Hammad’s TBR list • Book reviews you need to read this week • The anxiety of finally publishing a book after years of covering them • How the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris launched lit mags • The best book covers of September • On alternative medicine and emotional manipulation on the eve of Nazi takeover • Contending with the duality of fentanyl • Brittany K. Allen talks Rooneymania on The Lit Hub Podcast • What do sports journalism and romance writing have in common? • These are September’s best reviewed books • The deeply dreamy nature of writing • The spookiest literary stories coming to a streaming service near you • Literature and moral panic 250 years after The Sorrows of Young Werther • On the Evangelicals who want to open Bible museums • Peter Mishler talks to Michael Leong • What Garth Greenwell is reading