Lit Hub Weekly: April 17–21, 2023

TODAY: In 1899, Vladimir Nabokov is born.

“Pugilistic metaphors and hard-drinking aphorisms … a brittle misogyny and a vainglorious narcissism. And then there are all the dead animals.” David Barnes considers the baggage of Ernest Hemingway, 100 years after his first published work. | Lit Hub Criticism
How language acquisition nourishes a love of literature. | Lit Hub
“But where’s its anus?” Jaime Green on how (and why) we speculate about alien lifeforms. | Lit Hub Science
Katy Simpson Smith on writing a Southern woman louder than herself: “Southern writers are tearing holes in the veils, recasting what’s considered speakable.” | Lit Hub
David Grann’s The Wager, Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, and Ramona Ausubel’s The Last Animal all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
C.S. Harris considers the art of historical fiction. | CrimeReads
Memoirist Amy Silverstein on the “stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine” of organ donation, and preparing to say goodbye to her transplanted heart—and life. | The New York Times
Colson Whitehead on the books that have shaped his life: “In seventh grade English class we read the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and I thought: here’s a Black weirdo who writes; maybe there’s room for a Black weirdo like me.” | The Guardian
“Among the journalists, there was a sense of claustrophobic mania, of being on the brink, even before the profound disappointment of the tarot session.” Lauren Oyler (begrudgingly) goes on the Goop cruise. | Harper’s Magazine
Christian Lorentzen revisits George Trow’s epic 1980 essay “Within the Context of No Context,” an essay that took up almost an entire issue of the New Yorker in 1980. | The Point
Wait—are you telling us one of the great chroniclers of adventure and derring-do, David Grann, gets put off by a few bugs? | The Wall Street Journal
Seventy years after John Steinbeck visited Le Sirenuse, the Amalfi Coast hotel continues beckoning literary types with a springtime writers’ retreat. | Air Mail
“‘Creativity,’ as the name for a personal attribute or a mental faculty, is a recent phenomenon.” Louis Menand on the origins of creativity. | The New Yorker
“I wasn’t sure what to expect when I signed up for one of the first ever sleepovers at California’s largest new and used bookstore.” One night at The Last Bookstore. | Los Angeles Times
Check out anime legend Hayao Miyazaki’s favorite kid’s books. | Open Culture
Jennifer Wilson considers the pool parties and class war of Emma Cline’s latest novel, The Guest. | The Nation
Rita Dove, Jeannette Winterson, Joy Harjo, Weike Wang, Margaret Atwood, Sigrid Nunez, Mona Awad, Raven Leilani, Layli Long Soldier, and more all feature in T Magazine’s “Legends and Heirs” feature. | T Magazine
A new book tells the story of humanity from the perspective of the bugs that shaped us. | The Atlantic
Almost every Judy Blume book has been banned somewhere in America. | Distractify
Here are ten Black-owned bookstores you can visit this summer on your cross-country literary road trip. | Ebony
“Can a reader’s experience of fictional landscapes shape her interaction with actual landscapes?” Yes. The answer is yes. | Christianity Today