Lit Hub Weekly

Lit Hub Weekly July 17 - 21, 2017

TODAY:  In 1990, Argentine author Manuel Puig dies.   ·         The first official trailer for Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time adaptation has been released. | YouTube ·         In response to the news about a potential bidding war for James Comey’s book, former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page has announced his own project, which he claims will “prove infinitely more accurate, exciting and insightful.” | The New York Times BuzzFeed News ·         A host of other political books have also been announced, with authors ranging from Hillary Clinton to a former White House stenographer. | The New York Times ·         Catherine Lacey remembers the Cy Twombly exhibition that left her “in love, however briefly, with an entire building and all of its contents.” | The Paris Review ·         “I’d rather point out the abundance of mystery than pretend to solve it. As if I could solve it!” Rumaan Alam interviews The Dark Dark author Samantha Hunt. | The Rumpus ·         On Yale undergraduate Rebecca Shoptaw’s gender-bending web series adaptation of Middlemarch, “worth watching for its ambition as well as for its charm.” | The New Yorker ·         “A certain suspicion of explanation, particularly biographical explanation, has been at the core of his aesthetic.” On the surprising appearance of a John Ashbery biography. | The New Republic ·         “Everything was black. Only the blood was another color . . . ” An excerpt from Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War. | VICE ·         “As a novelist, I never want to write about ‘issues’ like ‘the Indian family.’ What I want to write about is the air we breathe.” An interview with Arundhati Roy. | The Nation ·         On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, the Bank of England unveiled a (controversial, but not for the reasons you might expect) new banknote bearing her likeness. | NPR ·         When a bookseller’s moral and political unease about J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy comes into conflict with “that old chestnut about the customer always being right.” | The Millions ·         “They ain’t all bedtime stories,” says Keanu Reeves of X Artists’ Books, the independent press he’s launching with artist Alexandre Grant and designer Jessica Fleischmann. | Los Angeles Times ·         The tides have turned since the Brontë sisters and George Elliot were publishing under manly names: Men are now adopting androgynous pseudonyms to sell psychological thrillers. | Jezebel ·         “I feel like so much of contemporary loneliness in motion is this compulsion to share my web browser.” Eileen Myles, Melissa Broder, and other writers and artists on using social media as a creative tool. | The Creative Independent ·         “If you’d never been to an actual wedding, and had gathered your ideas about their nature from fiction alone, you would imagine them as sites of unremitting carnage and despair.” On the depiction of weddings in novels. | The Cut     ENTER FOR A CHANCE TO WIN       ALSO THIS WEEK ON LITERARY HUB