Lit Hub Weekly: November 2 – 6, 2020

TODAY: In 1910, Leo Tolstoy dies.

• “The Babur Nama is an oddly modern text, almost Proustian in its self-awareness.” William Dalrymple on the 16th-century memoir far ahead of its time. | Lit Hub Biography
• “We have had no truth and reconciliation process.” On the renaissance of American white supremacy, a conversation with Isaac Bailey, Kathleen Belew, and Connor Towne O’Neill. | Lit Hub Politics
• “The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us… The earth is not impervious to the presence of man.” N. Scott Momaday, not mincing words. | Lit Hub Climate Change
• “Put bluntly, you sometimes need to acknowledge that you have no fucking idea what you’re looking at.” Ben Eastham makes the case for embracing uncertainty in art. | Lit Hub Art
• Andrew Sean Greer on David Sedaris, Christian Lorentzen on Martin Amis, Molly Antopol on Nicole Krauss, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• The CrimeReads editors recommend 10 crime novels out in November that will provide a much-needed distraction. | CrimeReads
• “It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping.” Ben Ehrenreich interviews scholars of societal collapse. | New York Times Magazine
• “Wilmington’s bleak story of voter suppression stems from a tale of two Reconstructions.” David Blight writing about David Zucchino’s history of North Carolina’s 1898 Wilmington coup is eerily topical. | NYRB
• Read a new short story by George Saunders, in which a man plays “Squatting Ghoul Eight” in the Hell-themed cave of an amusement park. (Relatable!) | The New Yorker
• “Many newcomers to the suburbs are not only surviving but excelling. They are reshaping the story in their own image, but they are also living with the knowledge that such a story is precarious.” Simon Han on the changing face—and story—of the American suburbs. | The Paris Review
• What makes a good Stephen King adaptation? Stephen King has thoughts. | Washington Post
• Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris is often called one of the best sci-fi films ever. Why, then, did Lem dislike it so much? | Far Out
• “To what extent were you justified in getting rid of a tyrant?”: A new book examines the minor figures who played a role in the plot against Julius Caesar. | Smithsonian Magazine
• Why did so many students in mid-20th-century China grow up knowing Mark Twain’s satirical newspaper article  “Running for Governor”? | The Buffalo News
• Sandor Katz on fermented foods, microbes, and intimate connections. | Emergence Magazine
• “To make sense of things this desperate fall I have been rereading the Greeks, and the Greeks say birds tell us what is to come.” Anna Badkhen on mythology, prophecy, and migratory birds. | The Paris Review
• “They really do think we’ll watch anything. And perhaps, in the end, they are right.” Rachel Syme on the “superficial, slapdash new Netflix adaptation” of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. | The New Yorker
• “Nation-builders.” “Framers of the Constitution.” Why do we describe the Founding Fathers with the language of physical labor? | JSTOR Daily
• “What does it mean—to you, to me, to Richard, to Emily Wilson, to William Barr—when we say someone is ‘left to his own devices’?” On The Odyssey, the election, Covid, and how we deal with crises in the absence of divine intervention. | Document
• “He is dangerous and violent and angry and traitorous, but at the core of it all, the wellspring of Rabadash’s character defects is that he is a fool.” Revisiting C.S. Lewis on dangerous leaders. | Tor
• With the imposition of a second lockdown in France, which has one of the highest rates of book readership in the world, many people there are mourning bookstore closures again. | France 24

Also on Lit Hub:

Turns out Gabriela Garcia Marquez was also against interpretation • How the literary world reinvented the book festival in real time • LA’s resident mountain lion is a lonely hunter • On the odd life of a Zoom poet-for-hire • Priya Basil on the living histories of regional cuisine • Valzynhya Mort: “Is there anything more beautiful than night in a Soviet microregion?” • What we talk about when  we talk about Titles Like This • Dan Moller on the technical challenges of playing Bach • Susana Moreira Marques on the comic misunderstandings of motherhood • Kathleen Flenniken reconsiders what it means to love one’s country • Michael Fischer on moving beyond the binary of criminality • Gilda Daniels on the roots of voter deception • Michelle Jackson on the myths of American opportunity • Loretta Napoleoni on the heroic women who stitched their way to freedom • Studying the art of the Middle Ages as a queer Latinx • Jerald Walker gets a bad haircut and goes downhill from there • A brief history of citational fiction and literary supercuts • Chris Stedman attempts to find humanity on the internet • Wayne Coyne on the last song he’d play before dying • Patrick Rosal on family history, language ecosystems, and life in the cane fields • Meet the high school teacher who changed Kaveh Akbar’s life • Emily van Duyne on loving, and misunderstanding, Sylvia Plath • Charles Bowden on the US-Mexico border and what America has chosen not to understand • Spend some time with Cees Nooteboom wandering through Venice • Tony Conniff does a close reading of Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” • Sandra Cisneros on the #MeToo movement, narrative voice, and The House on Mango Street

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

Crime and the city explores the “educated” novels of collegiate Cambridge • How the discovery of a rare pink diamond led Matthew Hart to thrillers • Susie Yang with six anti-heroines who test the limits of morality • John Connolly has a few thoughts on the state of Irish crime fiction • “Turmoil and fear and injustice have always existed”: an interview with Tana French • Michael Gonzales remembers a hospitable drug dealer who would become the victim of a senseless crime • Tara Lush on the sunburnt comfort of tropical cozies in trying times • Dominic Martell has some advice for helping your characters age gracefully • H. B. Lyle on Erskine Childers, the gentleman spy novelist who became a revolutionary • Is your character a serial killer or a vigilante? Layne Fargo has some ideas