Lit Hub Weekly: September 3 - 6, 2019

• “If you’re woke, it’s because someone woke you up.” Rebecca Solnit on the hard work behind progress. | Lit Hub Politics
• “The creation of a novel is akin to a mad scramble up a mountainside.” Walter Mosley on discovering who your book’s characters really are. | Lit Hub Craft and Criticism
• Who has time to read? And where? And on what? Leah Price offers a brief history of the “traveling” book. | Lit Hub Technology
• Michiko Kakutani on Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Jeanette Winterson on Salman Rushdie’s Don Quixote-inspired new novel, and more of the Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• “Yes, they are on the run, pursued. But the real tension comes from how they talk.” A.B. Jewell on the power of great noir dialogue. | CrimeReads
• A profile of Malcolm Gladwell, polarizing, badly reviewed, but perennially popular, and now, with his new book, ”at something of a professional tipping point.” | The New York Times
• “There are 7 billion people, can anybody change the world?” Nell Zink has her doubts. | The Guardian
• “It’s hard for the culture to get its head around this idea of shared hearts”: on the pleasures and pitfalls of collaborative novel writing. | The New Yorker
• Elizabeth Warren’s 2005 personal finance book (which she wrote with her daughter) holds up pretty well, right down to the throwaway Trump burn. | Bloomberg
• “We all know that men don’t understand women. How could they? Women spend the whole time trying to understand themselves.” Joanne O’Leary on the fiction of Nancy Hale. | Bookforum
• Read an interview with Nick Flynn about his latest collection, I Will Destroy You, which “was written in a state of consciously and actively attempting not to write.” | BOMB
• Stephen King discusses his 61st(!) novel, which has some unintentional (and terrifying) parallels to the present moment. | The New York Times
• On Wednesday Amazon broke the sales embargo on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which is pretty much bad for everyone except them. Read the first excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. | The Hub, The Guardian
• “Writing is a long process of terror punctuated by periods of intense, unsurpassed pleasure.” Tash Aw and Chia-Chia Lin in conversation. | The Believer
• ‘We are biased to believe in being, especially our own, and have a very difficult time conceiving of non-being”: Roy Scranton on why it’s so hard for us to imagine any kind of global mass extinction scenario. | The Baffler
• “What did it mean, the 31-year-old Baldwin telling a story he wanted to tell that wasn’t the kind of story he was supposed to tell?” Hilton Als reconsiders Giovanni’s Room (alongside some very sexy photographs). | T Magazine
• Can the film adaptation of Donna Tartt’s divisive The Goldfinch solve a book in which “the density of detail is such that the sentences become verbless lists”? | The Guardian
• A coalition has formed to locate and restore three missing Sherlock Holmes films from the silent era. It includes the UCLA Film & TV archive, America’s largest Sherlock society, and Robert Downey, Jr. himself. | Los Angeles Times

Also on Lit Hub:

Is Goodnight Moon Freemason propaganda? (And more important questions raised by these one-star Amazon reviews) • Let us now hear the tale of the Hodag, legendary monster of the mighty Midwest • Jennine Capó Crucet on political (and natural) disasters in her home state of Florida • On dark tourism: Murder, hauntings, and the serial killer capital of Australia • Hanif Abdurraqib on book tours, vacations, and the joy of coming home • From gutting fish to entertaining with Alison Roman, 12 of the fall’s tastiest cookbooks • Donna Masini on familial anxiety, and the tyranny and comfort of things • On narrative medicine and finding new ways to talk about pain • Meredith Talusan on the complexities of telling the Filipino immigrant’s story • From the city of samurai to the gardens of nobility, all of Tokyo’s identities live on in its literature • Charles Johnson remembers the great Paule Marshall, who died last month at 90 • On the unlikely extremes of Maoist influence on the West • Mike Magee on the dark side of the Medical Industrial Complex • Elizabeth Ames, progressive novelist, on the pitfalls of sharing a name with Elizabeth Ames, free marketeer • What not to expect from your MFA • How a good conversation is like a (good) game of tennis • Dylan Jones on “Wichita Lineman” and one of the greatest musical couplets ever written • Olga Zilberbourg on the subtle subversion of Soviet propaganda in Aleksandr Volkov’s adaptation of The Wizard of Oz • On Charles S. Wright, the writer who rejected the Black literary bourgeoisie • Read a newly translated story by Etgar Keret, translated by Jessica Cohen • Not sure what to read and feeling listless? Here’s THE ULTIMATE list of the most anticipated books of the fall, based on many other lists

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

CrimeReads has your guide to all the best crime and mystery shows streaming this month • Ten new crime and mystery books to read this September • Catherine Ryan Howard tells us not to fear incorporating technology into a modern thriller • Paul French takes us on a crime fiction tour of the Hamptons • What is it about podcasts that so enchants us? Emily Stein takes us to PodCon • Stephanie Van Schilt on seven true crime podcasts that don’t sacrifice ethics for storytelling • Dominique Kalifa on theVictorian Era’s obsession with slumming • Seven contagion classics that are sure to get under your skin, from David Koepp • Six crime novels that roar with the soul of the 20s, from Ashley Weaver • “There’s nothing so contagious as covetousness.” Jamie Mason on the shadowy world of art theft