Lit Hub Weekly: August 17 – 21, 2020

TODAY: In 1893, Dorothy Parker is born.

“An honest photograph can be turned into almost anything by a misleading caption.” Rebecca Solnit on Twitter conspiracies, QAnon, and the case of the two-faced mailboxes. | Lit Hub
Why do most movies suck? Ted Hope, film executive, contemplates mediocrity. | Lit Hub Film
Must every nation have its own Sylvia Plath? Rhian Sasseen on the inescapability of Plath for writers the world over. | Lit Hub
Parul Sehgal on Helen Macdonald, James Wood on Catherine Lacey, Christian Lorentzen on J. M. Coetzee, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
Jack Reacher and the grand unified theory of thrillers: Malcolm Gladwell dives into the world of Lee Child and his legendary wandering warrior. | CrimeReads
“We’ve already survived an apocalypse.” How Indigenous writers are changing sci-fi. | New York Times
Maya Angelou, Julia Alvarez, Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and other writers make USA Today’s list of the most influential women of the century. | USA Today
On William McGonagall, “the worst famous poet in the English language.” | Lapham’s Quarterly
“I was at Mount Sinai, one of the leading hospitals in the country, and I had just delivered a baby without a doctor or nurse present.” Naomi Jackson on giving birth in America as a Black woman. | Harper’s
Meet the anonymous lawyer valiantly (and sometimes rudely) correcting all the typos in The New York Times. | The Ringer
HBO’s Lovecraft Country takes on the dark legacy of racism in the original work of H.P. Lovecraft. | Vox
A former poet laureate of Nepal, Madhav Prasad Ghimire, has died at 102. | Yahoo
“Women are no longer content to shut up.” Mieko Kawakami on feminist activism in Japan. | The Guardian
“These books, so reluctant to engage with change, agency, and suffering, turn instead to awareness, which they frame as atonement.” On Naoise Dolan, Sally Rooney and the self-awareness trap in literary fiction. | The New Yorker
“It’s a nature word for a color most often found in nature. A dreamy word for a color that exists at the edges of the night.” Katy Kelleher follows the history of periwinkle. | The Paris Review
Ocean Vuong, who will be the seventh author to contribute to the Future Library art project, talks about writing against the market and for the future (if you’re around in 2114, enjoy Vuong’s book!). | MSN
Nearly half of Jones Hill Wood, the woodland that inspired Roald Dahl to write Fantastic Mr. Fox, will be destroyed to make room for a planned railway in the UK. | PoliticsHome
What can we learn from early manuscripts of classic novels (besides that Percy Bysshe Shelley was a shameless margin-flirter)? | BBC
“If we are serving a whole country, then we need people within our publishing houses who reflect what our country looks like.” Lisa Lucas on the ongoing reckoning in publishing. | GEN
“No one knows better than Stephens that the issues that threatened to destroy the Romance Writers of America go all the way back to its beginning.” On Vivian Stephens, a pioneer of romance publishing who’s never gotten her due. | Texas Monthly
At a time when browsing books indoors feels risky, people are turning to Little Free Libraries more than ever. | Los Angeles Times

Also on Lit Hub:

Darin Strauss on finding catharsis—and inspiration—in the story of a family betrayal • A letter from Arab artists and intellectuals, in support of an enlightened Lebanon · From Beirut, Farah Aridi writes about the rage that follows grief • Anna Bruno reflects on the “profound lessons in humanity” that dogs offer us • Mrs. Bridge is a perfect novel—but how does it work? • A letter from North Carolina: Randall Kenan on learning from ghosts of the Civil War • Sarah Chayes on the criminal masterminds of the Gilded Age (who created the very American system we live under today) • In defense of psychoanalysis and writing Freudian fiction • Breaking down the roiling, emotional middle of a James Baldwin narrative • David Lerner Schwartz on the tripartite puzzle that is Percival Everett’s Telephone • Sofian Merabet on safety and security as a particularly American preoccupation • Emma Jane Unsworth on how to write a millennial character • Mary O’Connell writes a love letter to The Catcher in the Rye • Grant Faulkner on the infinite possibilities of flash fiction • Scott Cheshire on conceptions of an animal afterlife • Why have we failed to protect coal miners? Chris Hamby on one of America’s most dangerous jobs • Colleen Abel on growing up with Bradbury’s ghost in Waukegan, Illinois

Best of Book Marks:

Watchmen, Beloved, The Nickel Boys, and more rapid-fire book recs from Black Card author Chris Terry • Sick, Scandalous, Spectacular: the first reviews of Lolita • The Sellout, The Brothers Karamazov, Where the Red Fern Grows, and more rapid-fire book recs from Nishta J. Mehra • Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, and Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week