Lit Hub Weekly: October 2-6, 2023

TODAY: In 1993, Toni Morrison becomes the first black American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“Just why The Kite Runner has become so popular isn’t entirely clear to me… but there is a universality to this tale of a boy who feels inadequate and longs for his father’s love.” Khaled Hosseini reflects on the 20th anniversary of his novel, The Kite Runner. | Lit Hub Craft
“American gunmakers made 1.9 million AR rifles for sale in the United States in the year after Sandy Hook, the most they had ever manufactured in a single year.” On America’s culture war over the AR-15. | Lit Hub Politics
Jonathan Russell Clark on the spate of recent writer documentaries and the films about Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, and Tom Wolfe. | Lit Hub Film & TV
Syrian author, poet, and screenwriter Khaled Khalifa, whose novels set in Aleppo memorialized a city ruined by civil war, has died aged 59. | The Guardian
“Early eighteenth-century readers cannot necessarily have been secure in their ability to understand the books they read.” Abigail Williams on misunderstanding Greek and Latin in the eighteenth century. | Lapham’s Quarterly
Michelle Santiago Cortés considers the enduring appeal of the art book. | Dirt
Twenty-eight years ago, a book club began reading one novel – Finnegan’s Wake. Yesterday, they finally reached the last page of the book. | The OC Register
“The Caribbean isn’t a geographical area, but rather a cultural one. It doesn’t only cover the Caribbean Sea. For me, it begins in the south of the United States – everything that is Louisiana and Florida – and extends to northern Brazil.” A previously unpublished interview with Gabriel García Márquez | El País
“In the end, great books will always be their own best defense.” Margaret Renkl on the arguments against book banning, no matter where you stand politically. | New York Times
Merve Emre talks to Lydia Davis, a writer whose “attentiveness to the marvel of the individual letter, the punctuation mark, and the italicized word, are perfectly and savagely deployed.” | The New Yorker
A conversation with Hélène Cixous on writing as a woman, the meaning of Jewishness, and the impossibility of understanding. | Jewish Currents
“It’s this kind of writing that helps me develop more of the thing that it seems I’ve always lacked: empathy.” John J. Lennon on what it’s like to be a journalist in prison. | Esquire
On Mexico’s radical, forgotten experiment with drug legalization in the 1930s. | The Dial
A visit to the Andover Bookstore, the oldest bookstore in the United States, established in 1809, the same year Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and Edgar Allan Poe were all born. | MassLive
“The amount of scholarship on Homer and his works can be daunting: the field is so broad, rich, and yes, old.” An introductory reading list to Homer. | JSTOR Daily