Lit Hub Weekly: July 6 – 10, 2020

TODAY: In 1558, playwright Robert Greene, a man of sour temperament who, it is believed, deeply resented Shakespeare’s success, is born.

Freedom means can rather than should: Gabrielle Bellot on what the Harper’s open letter gets wrong. | Lit Hub Politics
“She makes the supernatural natural, the natural real and radiant.” James Lefenstey on Louise Erdrich, who salvages wisdom from absurdity and injustice. | Lit Hub
Tear them down: Siri Hustvedt on old statues, bad science, and a history of American ideas that just won’t die. | Lit Hub Politics
Kristen Lepionka gives us a brief history of queer women detective characters in crime fiction. | CrimeReads
Conspiracy theories, Trump family secrets, Rodham revisited, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
Hope Wabuke on racial violence and “the pain of the KKK joke.” | The Paris Review
After the Afro-Cuban novelist Hache Carrillo died of COVID earlier this year, the literary world learned he was not Afro-Cuban at all. Lisa Page reflects on her colleague’s unusual case of racial passing. | The Washington Post
“The idea was funny and dark and very DeLillo. So there it began.” On the making (and the disappearance) of the only screenplay Don DeLillo ever wrote. | The Ringer
“Books should be for pleasure. If all Black books were about racism, where would we be able to escape it and get away from it?” Rumaan Alam interviews Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, America’s oldest Black book imprint. | Slate
How does a novel express silence? Two books from Latin America take different approaches. | Public Books
For a dose of pandemic travel porn: Rick Steves recalls his visits to some of Europe’s great libraries. | Luxury Travel Advisor
“I found it as haunting as anything I’ve read in this bewildering year.” Willa Cather’s “quietly shattering” One of Ours is worth revisiting. | The New Yorker
China’s new national security law requires Hong Kong schools to remove books that are “outdated” and involve “serious crime or socially and morally unacceptable [acts].” | CNN
29 writers, including Téa Obreht, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, Charles Yu, Rachel Kushner, and Rivers Solomon, have written new short stories inspired by the pandemic for The New York Times Magazine’s Decameron Project. | The New York Times
After six decades in the industry, publisher Nan A. Talese will retire. In addition to running her own imprint, she edited books like Schindler’s List and acquired The Handmaid’s Tale, among others. | Publishers Lunch
“I used to be able to do this; I know I used to be able to do this. I used to be able to make love to Harrison Ford’s wife!” Treat yourself to Patricia Lockwood’s coronavirus dia ry. | London Review of Books
Toni Tipton Martin on food, race, and her complicated relationships with Baltimore and New York City. | The Baltimore Sun
Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, has died at 62. | Laramie Boomerang
Sarah Broom tends to avoid reading memoirs (or, Other Things You’d Like to Know About Sarah Broom’s Reading Habits). | The New York Times
The current book purge under Xi Jinping in China isn’t the country’s first national campaign to clear out “inappropriate” works. Similar campaigns have been happening since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. | Reuters

Also on Lit Hub:

Even Seamus Heaney made mistakes: On poetry, Wordsworth, and misremembered locales • In early modern Europe, reading and writing meant getting your hands dirty • Manuel Muñoz writes a letter from Tucson • Brian Castleberry on Saul Bellow’s celebration of the messy and manic • Gina Rae La Cerva on the last days of the lobstering life in Maine • Sameer Pandya on the virtues of a late start • Rachel Beanland on family secrets and how we deliver bad news • Rural stories that get it right: a reading list • On the isolation of being deaf in prison • Climate crisis reading: Books by Mario Alejandro Ariza, Ben Ehrenreich, Mary Robinette Kowal, and more • Maya Alexandri on the life of an EMT during a pandemic • Lacy Crawford’s scenes from a shooting range • Dolores Dorantes and Ben Ehrenreich discuss deserts, race-sickness, and the shape of time • André Aciman follows literary ghosts in St. Petersburg • Veronica Esposito on the life-changing power of Trauma and Recovery • The men who brought political radicalism to Oscar Wilde • Yu Miri’s view from the railways of Japan • The rise of the feminized city: Leslie Kern on women, gentrification, and public spaces • Megan Marshall remembers Robert D. Richardson, the precise, compassionate Emerson and Thoreau biographer • On the 1979 Southall anti-racism protests and Blair Peach’s murder at the hands of police

Best of Book Marks:

New titles from Garth Greenwell, Jenny Offill, James McBride, Hilary Mantel, and Louise Erdrich all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of 2020 (so far) • Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and more rapid-fire book recs from Anbara Salam • Hieroglyphics author Jill McCorkle recommends five books about exploring the past, from Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter • Wide Sargasso Sea, Alice in Wonderland, Flights, and more rapid-fire book recs from Douglas A. Martin • From the archives: a classic review of To Kill a Mockingbird • New titles from Lynn Steger Strong, Charlie Kaufman, Ben Ehrenreich, Paul Tremblay, and Duchess Goldblatt all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week