Lit Hub Weekly: November 9 – 13, 2020

TODAY: In 1968, Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who holds the record for most times nominated for a Nobel Prize, on 23 different occasions between 1931 and 1966, dies. (He never won.)

“The aftereffects of an evil dictatorship are hard to get rid of, to scrub clean. It usually involves a steadfast struggle, and justice is really the only remedy.” Francisco Goldman on the fall of Donald Trump. | Lit Hub Politics
“The drama in Shirley Hazzard’s work arises from the bruising interactions between those who are responsive to beauty, and those who are not.” Zoë Heller on the collected stories. | Lit Hub Literary Criticism
Why I paid tenfold to buy back the rights for two of my books: Kiese Laymon on revision, radical friendship, and community. | Lit Hub Memoir
Intriguing insights into new books by Yaa Gyasi, Sayaka Murata, Kevin Young, and more. | Book Marks
A murder at Harvard and a half-century of silence: Becky Cooper investigates a decades-old mystery. | CrimeReads
“The crucial thing in considering Dickens is deciding how best to read him.” Robert Gottlieb on the vast fictional universe and troubled personal life of Charles Dickens. | The New York Times
An interview with Matthew Desmond, whose writing on evictions and moratoriums in the US have only become more relevant throughout the pandemic. | Columbia Journalism Review
“In this moment we crave understanding. Right ways of writing that might transmute into right ways of being. But I suspect we’re looking in the wrong places.” Larissa Pham on eliding the space between author and subject and the limits of the viral book review. | The Nation
“What goes on creatively at a time when very little is going on?” Peter Marks wonders about the state of culture once we get to the other side. | The Washington Post
To mark what would have been Mercedes Berchada’s 88th birthday, Felipe Restrepo Pombo remembers “La Gaba” and her decades-long partnership with Gabriel García Márquez. | Words Without Borders
“Why is a word used to describe a literary technique also the word used to describe the buffoonery, the cruelty and carelessness, of contemporary political and economic life?” Merve Emre on gimmicks in literature and capitalism. | The New Yorker
“I want the readers to really feel what I felt, in order for them to truly understand what it’s like to be a child immigrant.” Javier Zamora on writing and empathy. | Slate
Agatha Christie’s first murder mystery was published in October 1920. One-hundred years later, what still draws so many readers to her work? | The Boar
A statue honoring writer and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft prompted backlash in the UK for its depiction of a nude woman. | BBC
Since the pandemic began, many more people have turned to journaling. | Vox
“She chose the literary life over love, family, and even her health, writing through illness and pain. Yet Austin never became the Thoreau of the West, as she’d hoped.” Joy Lanzendorfer on the life of the early (and mostly forgotten) nature writer Mary Austin. | Alta
“The boundaries between prank, hoax, agitprop and literary or art-world experiment . . . have become blurrier in the digital age.” On the “literary” origins of QAnon. | The Telegraph
“I know from poetry that it’s often when I’m trying the least to be ‘poetic’ that the most charged truths emerge.” Chen Chen on fear and essay-writing. | Poets & Writers
What role did African-American thought leaders like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and George Padmore play in the anti-fascist struggles of the mid-20th century? | JSTOR
How does President Barack Obama’s new book, A Promised Land, rank alongside other presidential memoirs? | Smithsonian Magazine

Also on Lit Hub:

Remembering Joan Bingham • A conversation with Jonathan Lethem and a Q&A (in which he takes issue with some of our questions) • Tracy K. Smith on translating the world of Yi Lei • A poem by Margaret Atwood • Sir David Attenborough makes the case for “green” growth •

Sarah Haas on what a book can be • David Lazar tells a tale of two Oscars, Levant and Wilde • On black holes • Remembering the great Alex Trebek • Ruth Gilligan on the tricky task of mixing fact, fiction, myth, and everything in between • A people’s history of bathing • A conversation with poet Jericho Brown • Emily Temple finds a little pandemic peace in reading old books • When Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder roamed the Pacific Northwest • On walking as a dissident act • Maybe opera is for you? • On George Eliot’s feminism • The women who resisted the Nazis in Britain’s Channel Islands • Shocker: Eudora Welty read from a very early age • Caroline Weber on new money’s Gilded Age search for old world respectability • Revolution and memory in the diaries of Imre Kertész • Jim Gray looks back at the superstar rift between Shaq and Kobe • Deborah Madison tells her foodie origin story

Best of Book Marks:

As I Lay Dying, The Known World, The Phantom Tollbooth, and more rapid-fire book recs from Steph Cha • Dinty W. Moore recommends five books that have helped to define flash nonfiction, from Bernard Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets • On what would have been Kurt Vonnegut’s ninety-eight birthday week, here are the very first reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five • New titles from Jonathan Lethem, Danielle Evans, and Jo Nesbø all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week