Lit Hub Weekly

Lit Hub Weekly February 5 - 9, 2018

TODAY:  In 1890, Boris Pasternak, author of the novel Doctor Zhivago and winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, is born.   ·         30 publishers have signed a letter urging the Man Booker organizers, who allowed Americans to be considered for the prize in 2014, to reverse that decision. | The Guardian ·         “The best women nature writers have leverage to be less sentimental, to tell a more complicated story.” An interview with Blair Braverman and Emily Ruskovich. | Adventure Journal ·         “If his students could learn to think well, to enjoy reading books, some part of them would be uncaged. That was what Gordon Hauser told himself, and what he told them, too.” Read from Rachel Kushner’s forthcoming novel, The Mars Room. | The New Yorker ·         “I want to teach my daughters that they are entitled to silence. But I also want to teach them that sometimes it’s okay to snarl back.” Danielle Lazarin is teaching her daughters to be rude (sometimes). | The Cut ·         “The heroine we need is against the hero. The antagonist. She remains outside.” Sarah Nicole Prickett on Wonder Woman and womanhood. | Artforum ·         “There’s a lot worse things in the world than being bored.” A short story by Stephanie Powell Watts. | Shondaland ·         A peek into the borrowing records at the private New York Society Library reveals the reading habits of writers like Roald Dahl, Herman Melville, and Malcolm Cowley. | Atlas Obscura ·         “At the core of these novels is an original unhappiness with the world, some deep sense of being at odds with it. What better way to overcome that gap than to be a wizard?” On Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle. | The New Republic ·         “Beneath the glitz and cop-taunting banter runs a more sober current: the stark choices that faced those burdened with unwanted pregnancies in the dark days before Roe vs. Wade.” On two new biographies of early 20th-century abortionist Inez Burns. | The Outline ·         “I kept looking for stories like the one I was telling, but I couldn’t find them, and that terrified me.” Akwaeke Emezi on writing work that doesn’t look like anyone else’s, finding Nabokov, and creating a new kind of canon. | BuzzFeed Reader ·         This would remain a book about her life, not her illness: Mira T. Lee on writing a character who struggles with a mental illness. | Tin House ·         “It feels human to root for the underdog in the fine-dining heat map that is New York; visiting regularly is a choice both honorable and sad.” An ode to Planet Hollywood. | The Paris Review ·         “This idea of ‘beyond’ satisfied something in his imagination. He worked as though between the intricate systems of a ship and the vague horizon of a vast sea.” Colm Tóibin on Joseph Conrad. | NYRB ·         “The show itself is inspiring, although I hate to admit it because it makes me feel sappy and basic.” Juliet Escoria on how watching Project Runway got her through depression and literary rejection. Pairs nicely with Tim Gunn’s favorite books. | Broadly, Vulture ·         “How unfair it is, then, that Vladimir Nabokov can show up, decades after his death, with a store of dreams more lush and enthralling than many waking lives.” Dan Piepenbring on perhaps the only interesting dream accounts. | The New Yorker