Lit Hub Weekly: July 20 – 24, 2020

TODAY: In 1834, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies.

Yoko Ogawa, Masatsugu Ono, and more Japanese authors discuss their favorite Murakami short stories. | Lit Hub
“For decades I joked that home was somewhere around 33,000 feet. No more.” Samiya Bashir returns from Rome to an uncertain America. | Lit Hub Politics
“Our disappointment with the natural world has to do with the fact that it no longer serves to reflect back our values and fears to us.” Colin Dickey on sea serpents, Dogmen, and the tensions between folklore and mainstream science. | Lit Hub Science
Parul Sehgal on Alex Trebek’s memoir, Helen Macdonald on a quest for the world’s most elusive owl, Masha Gessen on post-election nightmares, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
Crime and the City visits Lagos, the sprawling, dynamic center of Nigeria’s booming literary scene. | CrimeReads
The Vietnam War marked a turning point in the development of the American war novel. Would the greatest war novels celebrate a national defense apparatus or decry questionable government policies? | The New Republic
“Every day, we received assignments for letters, counting, reading. Every day, we failed to do them.” Keith Gessen on the impossibility of distance learning with kids. | The New Yorker
Why were writer and satirist Dorothy Parker’s ashes interred at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore? And what will happen to them when the headquarters are moved to D.C.? | Forward
“Like a death in brackets:” A literary scholar on losing her mother to Covid-19 and reading Virginia Woolf. | Avidly
In college, Jay Parini took an unexpected road trip in the Scottish Highlands with a talkative, elderly man. Not his grandfather, but Jorge Luis Borges. | The Daily Beast
COVID-19’s impact on the arts is “an indictment of a precarious arts culture that can only function when everyone is well and working.” | The Guardian
“Literature and dialogue cannot supplant restorative social policies and laws, organizational change, and structural redress.” Saida Grundy on why anti-racism books won’t fix America. | The Atlantic
The shortlisted nominees for this year’s Caine Prize speak on literary awards and the African authors they are reading now. | African Arguments
“In books, as in most things, Wharton looked askance at the ‘new.’” On the lessons of Edith Wharton’s library. | Lapham’s Quarterly
“How do you integrate the self again, when something has divided you?” How Natasha Trethewey wrote the story of her mother’s life and death. | Los Angeles Times
Need something to read? Check out this list of the 50 most impactful books by Black writers published in the last 50 years. | Essence
“This is a crucial part of fandom, a willingness to treat the imagined as meaningful, the decision to eschew skepticism and engage earnestly.” Raven Leilani on a trip to Comic Con after leaving her faith. | Esquire
Caroline Corcoran looks at domestic suspense, “mum noir” in the UK, and the dark side of motherhood in fiction. | Grazia
“I have never experienced this level of support around Black women and girls.” Inside the surge in support to create a new Black-owned bookstore in Inglewood. | Los Angeles Times

Also on Lit Hub:

What 100 writers have been reading in quarantine • Duende Books’ Angela Maria Spring on the institutional racism of the bookselling industry • Rachel Cohen on Jane Austen’s politics of walking • Lydia Davis on the decision to not fly • Guy Guratne on John Berger and writing as an act of distancing • How to write a timely novel in a world that won’t stop changing • Arra Lynn Ross on old Norse translations and decoding myths • Joshua Bennett on the places where Black life is lived • How will future Mars explorers deal with the most challenging thing about life on the Red Planet? (Boredom) • Jarvis Masters

writes from death row in San Quentin as Covid-19 spreads unchecked • Why did Republicans abandon American idealism? • On techno as a cure for writer’s block • Siri Hustvedt, in contemplation of a photograph by Rachel Cobb, on what the world values when it’s falling apart • Frank Tallis takes the anthropological view of storytelling • Oliver Stone reflects on bringing the spirit of Homer’s epics to the screen in Platoon • How John Steinbeck’s final novel grappled with immigration and morality • A love letter to developmental editors • Catherine Lacey talks to Kristin Iversen about religion, alienation, and more • Lucie Britsch on learning her most important writing lesson from… Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure • Aya Gruber examines the complicated history of feminism’s impact on incarceration • Historian Alan Taylor wonders whether Thomas Jefferson was a hero or villain… (Both, and neither)

Best of Book Marks:

Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, and more rapid-fire book recs from Chia-Chia Lin • Debra Jo Immergut recommends five books that bend and fold time, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing • “In our own grief-ridden time, we may never need O’Farrell’s art more“: Lori Feathers on the novels of Maggie O’Farrell • From the archives: Eudora Welty’s rave review of Charlotte’s Web • New titles from Maggie O’Farrell, Catherine Lacey, Emma Donoghue, and Adrian Tomine all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week