Lit Hub Weekly: September 9 - 13, 2024

• Looking for your next read? The Lit Hub staff recommends 17 new fall novels to add to your bookshelf. | Lit Hub 
• Maris Kreizman on the importance of publishing gossip and Instagram’s xoxopublishinggg. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Alex Trimble Young considers the very modern consumer fantasy of gun ownership as a path to empowerment. | Lit Hub Politics
• Rebecca Nagle on how a small town murder raised questions of tribal sovereignty in the Muscogee Nation: “Many of the most important legal decisions about tribal land and sovereignty come from surprising places.” | Lit Hub History
• “Being very online had prepared Manning for war.” On Chelsea Manning and the trans internet. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Sex worker memoirs seldom make literary careers or appear on “best of” lists due to lingering queasiness over the subject matter and the bourgeois sensibilities of the publishing industry.” On Charlotte Shane and sex work memoirs. | The Baffler
• Samantha Schweblin guides your literary tour through Buenos Aires (translated by Megan McDowell). | The New York Times
• “The once-majestic empire quickly became a tragicomic history lesson and, more recently, colorful fodder for some bodice-ripping popular culture.” Natasha Wheatley profiles Eduard Habsburg. | The Dial
• “Currents offers sanctuary and a place of instruction for a generation of Jews who love their parents but have split with them.” On the role of Jewish Currents. | The New Yorker 
• Gabriel Fine asks, “What do we owe to language in times of unimaginable violence?” On Texas, poetics, and Palestine. | The Texas Observer
• “It makes me really sad for the queer kids in these communities, it makes me really sad even for non-queer kids, kids who are learning about people who aren’t like them, you know?”  Carmen Maria Machado talks to Tai Caputo about having her books banned. | The Little Hawk
• Sarah Schulman examines the work of painter Alice Neel: “A witness sees other people from a safe distance. A participant shares their vulnerability.” | New York Review of Books
• Rhoda Feng considers Jonathan Lethem’s art writing, which “takes us under the hood, revealing the ways that art and life are coextensive.” | Artforum
• Brave new world, indeed: When Aldous Huxley dropped acid. | JSTOR Daily
• “Claiming that A.I. can help get people published doesn’t make sense.” Laura Wheatman Hill digs into the NaNoWriMo AI kerfuffle. | Slate
• “We expect language to function in a very linear sense. One word comes after the other. One sentence after the other.” Helen Chazan on sequential bodies in comics. | The Comics Journal
• Nic Cavell examines literature of Uyghur persecution and liberation. | Dissent
• Considering two recent memoirs of Palestine. | New York Review of Books
• “The Black experience will always resist compilation.” Doreen St. Felix considers the language of Black identity. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub:

Cat Marnell and Anne Marie Tendler talk about self-doubt • Dunya Mikhail on translating her own work • The cross-cultural evolution of the notebook • Sara Nović on Joanne Greenberg’s In This Sign • Battles over book bans, Drag Queen Story Hour, and censorship • How localized conflicts sparked imperial violence  • Jerald Walker on crip walking • Devika Rege, Carolyn Jack, and more authors answer our burning questions •  Rachel Khong on Ha Jin’s Waiting and the mercy of the arbitrary • National identity in South Asia and the violence of partition • The impact of bomb threats and the rhetoric of school shooters • Aimie K Runyan spent her first literary paycheck on a mug • Peter Mishler talks to Srikanth Reddy • The literary and cultural socialization of young Black queer men • How Native Americans put limits on European colonial domination • What the Harris-Walz ticket can do to win over red state voters • The memories that linger where we write • Authors who capture the complexities of Myanmar • The Yemeni Jewish tradition of musical storytelling • How America turned weapons into a consumer commodity • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Introducing The Lit Hub Podcast! •  How to write aging characters without valorizing youth • On developing the language of horror •  The riots of northern England • The best reviewed books of the week • How an immigrant childhood influenced language  • Dylan C. Penningroth on the hidden story of Black history