Lit Hub Weekly: January 11 – 15, 2021

TODAY: In 1900, Kiku Amino, Japanese author and translator of English and Russian literature, is born.

When white supremacist mobs threaten democracy: David Zucchino on the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 and the Capitol Insurrection of 2021. | Lit Hub Politics
Navigating the intricacies of race and the violence of antiblackness: Nadia Owusu reflects on her early years in America. | Lit Hub Memoir
2021’s TV and film adaptations to watch out for, featuring Denzel Washington as Macbeth. | Lit Hub Film and TV
Keith Donohue on Gabriel Byrne’s elegiac memoir, Ron Charles on a feminist alt-history Western, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
Amy Stewart on epistolary novels and the inherent suspense of waiting on a letter. | CrimeReads
“A dictatorship is not created overnight. A genocide or a civil war does not arise out of thin air.” A conversation with Hannah Arendt’s new biographer. | The.Ink
“Lockdown.” “Superspreader.” Looking at these, and the other words, that have categorized our year of the coronavirus pandemic. | Columbia Journalism Review
“Everything makes me cry these days. My No Prep Slow Cooker cookbook made me cry yesterday.” An (extremely relatable) interview with Maggie Nelson. | EW
In honor of Wikipedia’s 20th(!) birthday, read an oral history of the website with all the answers. | OneZero
“In casting the struggles of his characters as valid, he affirmed that the struggles of the mostly Black women reading him were also valid.” An ode to the late Eric Jerome Dickey. | The Atlantic
Why do we keep rereading The Great Gatsby? Wesley Morris has a few ideas. | The Paris Review
John Freeman on the “exaggerations and falsehoods” that make up the mythology of the American West. | Alta
Revisiting 1965’s The Gay Cookbook, which “helped expose the very normalcy of queerness.” | JSTOR Daily
Author and journalist Ved Mehta has died at 86. | The Washington Post
Connecticut is actively investigating whether Amazon “engaged in anticompetitive behavior in the e-book business,” according to the state’s attorney general. | WSJ
“I don’t think you ever can escape your subjectivity, not totally, and while I do think looking outwards is always a good idea for a writer, starting from the self does not seem like a bad thing to me.” Read an interview with Madeleine Watts. | The Believer
“This amazing sense of fortitude and strength really came across to me.” Heather Clark on discovering more of Sylvia Plath’s story through research. | Slate

Also on Lit Hub:

Rebecca Solnit on September 11th, January 6th, and the choices we face as a nation.
Karl Ove Knausgaard on the genius of Ingmar Bergman • Michael Farris Smith on the genesis of his fascination with Nick Carraway • The writer’s work is finding out how delightful they are on the page, and other (delightful) revelations from George Saunders • Sarah Moss on the wandering life of the itinerant writer • Mateo Askaripour makes a case for writing fast • Madeleine Watts on the evolution of nature writing • Will Self kicks off a new series on how—and why—we read • Samantha Tucker considers how last week ’s attempted coup will be taught as history • William J. Bernstein on the evolutionary origins of collective delusion • Yiyun Li on Bette Howland’s 1974 memoir, about her stay in a Chicago psychiatric hospital • Amanda Mei Kim reflects on growing up on the road as a daughter of tenant farmers • On Martin Luther King’s Jr.’s handwritten statement from Big Rock jail • To write a modern climate change novel, Claire Holroyde centered the people most at risk • Amanda Page on parachute journalism and its opposite • Martha Cooley on the uses of boredom • Jamie Harrison on food ’s role in fiction • Olga Mecking recommends the Dutch art of doing nothing • Kim Echlin on teaching English lit in the wake of Mao’s Cultural Revolution

Best of Book Marks:

In honor of his birthday, a classic review of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom • Pride and Prejudice, The Velveteen Rabbit, and more rapid-fire book recs from Gish Jen • Is Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint the dirtiest literary novel ever published? • “The most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness”: Edmund Wilson’s 1922 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses • New titles from George Saunders, Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Barry, and Nadia Owusu all feature among the Best Reviewed Books
of the Week