Lit Hub Weekly: September 6–9, 2022

TODAY: In 1886, Hilda Doolittle, a poet and leader of the Imagist movement who used H.D. as her pseudonym, is born.

Ann Beattie in praise of the great Chef James Haller, whose lessons in cooking apply just as seamlessly to life. | Lit Hub Food
“It’s the kind of energy that just might change your life.” In praise of Martha Cooper’s exhilarating photos of 1980s NYC graffiti. | Lit Hub Photography
Law of the Tongue: When humans and killer whales hunt together. | Lit Hub
Brian McDonald recounts the riots and rivalries that led to the birth of the New York City Fire Department. | Lit Hub History
Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, and Edward Enninful’s A Visible Man all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
Martin Edwards presents a host of crime novels featuring libraries, bookshops, the publishing industry, and the world of collecting. | CrimeReads
“What’s the difference between education and indoctrination?” Jeffrey Aaron Snyder looks at the long dispute over what to teach in public schools. | The Point
Julie R. Enszer pays tribute to six lesbian feminist writers of the South who, with their work, “created a place to struggle and a place to engage and reimagine.” | The Bitter Southerner
“In the last several years of contemporary literature, there has existed alongside the relentlessly good character a spicier alternative: the relentlessly bad character.” Kate Shannon Jenkins considers the decline of the redemption arc in contemporary literature. | Gawker
Clare Thorp delves into new books that explore female desire. | BBC
Remembering Barbara Ehrenreich, whose books focused on the “overlooked and the forgotten” of society. | The New York Times
Masiyaleti Mbewe on the state of millennial fiction from African writers. | LARB
Neil McRobert ranked all 75 Stephen King books. | Esquire
Considering the perils of seeking life advice from philosophers. | The Point
“You can be a gun person involuntarily. At least that’s what I find myself wanting to tell people.” Andrew Howard on active-shooter training and gun violence in America. | Guernica
“Could anything more tragic than this befall those writers — a dispersion that may never come together again?” Homeira Qaderi on the state of Afghan literature under Taliban rule. | Los Angeles Review of Books
Librarians talk to Madeleine Carlile about how book bans are putting their funding and collections at risk. | TIME
Erin Blakemore tracks the history of book censorship in the United States. | National Geographic
Je Banach on the books whose introductions offer special insight into literary classics, from Brandon Taylor on Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction to Sally Rooney on Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays. | The Atlantic
“One of the reasons I wrote that book was because I kept noticing things that made me think, ‘Didn’t we do this? Aren’t we over this already?’” James Hannaham talks about blending tragedy with absurdity. | Interview