Lit Hub Weekly: September 9 - 13, 2019

• “We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time”: When Faber & Faber’s T.S. Eliot passed on George Orwell (and more). | Lit Hub Literary Criticism
• “The Spanish secret police had some of the spirit of the Gestapo, but not much of its competence”: on the Communist plot to assassinate George Orwell. | Lit Hub Biography
• “No harm if true; but, in fact, not true.” A brief history of mostly terrible campaign biographies. | Lit Hub Politics
• Jia Tolentino on Margaret Atwood’s exploration of complicity in Gilead, Laura Miller on Stephen King’s most terrifying monsters, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• James R. Benn finds out what Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy B. Hughes and other authors were publishing during WWII. | CrimeReads
• On the bizarre, eclectic life of Lafcadio Hearn, the 19th-century Greek-Irish writer whose collections of Japanese ghost stories added a modern twist to Victorian gothic horror. | The New Yorker
• “No matter how far you run, he all but cackles, you’ll always be those scared kids.” A.A. Dowd on re-reading Stephen King’s It as an adult—and confronting his own childhood in the process. | A.V. Club
• “In the case of a poet as famous as Dickinson, one might wish that Harvard would relax its grip.” On the ownership of Emily Dickinson. | LARB
• A group of librarians and archivists are working to digitize the millions of books that are secretly in the public domain, proving once again that librarians are the best. | Vice
• “If only as a critique of late capitalism, A Confederacy of Dunces uncannily identifies the deep ennui that accompanies today’s rat race.” On John Kennedy Toole, 50 years after his death. | Public Books
• On the new crop of fiction about artificial intelligence—including Will Eaves’s Murmur, Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me—which asks whether fiction itself will survive AI. | Financial Times
• “Toni Morrison didn’t win the Nobel Prize for dispensing banal platitudes; she got it for writing scabrous, gorgeous, complex books.” Sandra Newman makes a case against mourning beloved authors by reducing them to a series of quotes. | The Washington Post
• Emails released as part of a lawsuit by Guy Snodgrass, former aide to Defense Secretary James Mattis, show that the Pentagon deliberately delayed his memoir. | Mother Jones
• Crétien van Campen on drug-induced synesthesia—the “uncommon collaboration of several senses at once”—and its influence on the work of writers from Keats and Coleridge to Poe and Baudelaire. | The MIT Press Reader
• A book deal gone off the rails, a disenchanted BFF, and a shattered friendship: The wild story of Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway, as told by her former ghostwriter Natalie Beach. | The Cut
• The diary of Renia Spiegel, who was killed by Nazis in 1942 and referred to by some as the “Polish Anne Frank,” will be published by her family after sitting in a bank vault for decades. | BBC
• “She was a reader, in the fiercest sense.” Ruth Reichl remembers her editor, Susan Kamil. | The New York Times
• “I’m not denying that the novel is very much a portrait of its era, of IRA bombs and miners’ strikes and electricity cuts, but I found the broader malaise that underlies these specifics uncannily familiar.” Lucy Scholes on The Ice Age, Margaret Drabble’s 40 year old Brexit novel. | The Paris Review
• You should probably start reading right before bed—turns out those who do make more money, eat better food, and love their lives more than those who don’t. Coincidence? | Real Simple

Also on Lit Hub:

Just because Walt Whitman self-published poetry, doesn’t mean you should too • In conversation with Lucy Ellmann, who was—until her recent Booker Prize nomination—“the greatest American novelist no one in America had heard of” • On Gormenghast, The Big Book of Fantasy, and the sci-fi and fantasy that defies easy categorization • Honor Moore on the private moments that lead to a public movement • Brief interviews with imaginary friends (and the kids who love them) • Rosie Schaap spends a night trailing poet-turned-sommelier Amanda Smeltz • Tash Aw on living and writing as a divided Southeast Asian • Mirza Waheed on Kashmir under siege • Jhumpa Lahiri on editing an anthology of Italian fiction, and the need for more literature in translation • Christopher Ingraham on the importance of understanding purple America • Laura van den Berg on her family’s drive to see the unseeable • Nicholas Lehmann tells the story of community activist Earl Johnson • Five questions for Emma Donoghue • Rion Amilcar Scott and Danielle Evans discuss long-term revision, the risks of satire, and the “multiplicity of blackness” • Why don’t we listen to dogs? • Michael Scammell on the eerily prescient lessons of Darkness at Noon • When D.H. Lawrence’s “unlovely” paintings were confiscated by Scotland Yard • On Fadhil al-Azzawi, the Iraqi writer who modernized poetic forms • Kassandra Montag on the mythic Icelandic women that taught her to write blunt, unabashed characters • Brandon Taylor on what it is to grow up afraid • On Eric Garner, Jean-Michel Basquiat and police brutality as American tradition • In anticipation of the 2020s, here are some books from the 1920s worth reading now

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

John Vercher on graphic novels that explore social justice • A look at four iconic crime protagonists and the series they came to define • Read more spy fiction written by women, about women • Eleni Theodoropoulos on gothic storytelling and Scooby Doo • Olivia Rutigliano explains why the 90s rom-com was built out of the tradition of detective fiction • A hundred years ago, the country debated whether to arm women to combat sexual assaults • Alex Segura on the long, proud tradition of jazz-infused noir • Discover the world of forensic ecologists, the scientists who solve crimes by studying plant life