Lit Hub Weekly: November 11 – 15, 2024

TODAY: In 1930, Chinua Achebe is born.

• Gabrielle Bellot on the radical and harrowing nature of being trans in Trump’s America.  | Lit Hub Memoir
• Lili Anolik explores the tumultuous, iconic, and unmistakably literary friendship between Eve Babitz and Joan Didion. | Lit Hub Biography
• “I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very idea of them hopeful.” Katherine Rundell considers the near-eternal lives of Greenland sharks. | Lit Hub Nature
• “My personality is more indebted to The Simpsons than any other book or movie or album or show or art thing.” Meet the 2024 National Book Award finalists as they answer some of our quick questions. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Macmillan authors and staff are in open revolt over the Children’s Marketing VP’s support of Trump | Publishers Weekly
• How unions, including those representing writers and academics, are taking on AI. | Jacobin
• Victor LaValle talks to Jeff VanderMeer about the natural world and writing from experience. | Interview
• Colm Tóibín on Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall as a touchstone of queer literature. | The Nation
• Why the editors of the zine Queer Palestine “caution against reducing these lives to the spectacle of violence.” | Full Stop 
• “If Flaubert’s literary criticism set the terms of our own, it developed in dialogue with and in opposition to his interlocutors—often, if not exclusively, his female correspondents.” Victoria Baena on the feminist critic Amélie Bosquet’s influence on Flaubert. | The New Yorker
• “…you so readily confuse advocacy of unorthodox forms of thought with the promotion of violence, for it lays bare the totalitarian impulse at the core of your enterprise.” Orisanmi Burton pens an open letter to prisons that have banned his book, Tip of the Spear. | Public Books
• Sarah Thankam Matthews talks to Raghu Kanard about the fight against the far right in India. | Lux
• Florida’s Department of Education has released a list of 700 books that were banned from K-12 classrooms in the 2023-2024 school year, 400 more titles than in the previous year. | WUSF
• “The hearing world is enthralled with the beauty, ingenuity, and communication possibilities signed language presents, so long as it doesn’t have to look upon or give credit to actual deaf people.” Sara Nović on the commodification of deaf communication. | The Baffler 
• “In the world of science fiction, this culture war has been evident in online forums, publications, and awards campaigning. The fight is for ownership of the genre.” Jess Maginity on a book by Jordan S. Carroll and the far-right’s relationship to sci-fi. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Chris Kraus and Anna Poletti discuss BDSM, writing about sex, and the creative allure of asymmetrical relationships. | The Nation
• Jonathan Lethem considers Philip K. Dick, colonialism, and Palestine. | The Paris Review
• How white nationalist John Tanton became an architect of the American anti-immigration movement by blending “ecology with eugenics.” | Salon
• Historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed recommends books for our fractured political moment. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub:

Jonny Diamond on the importance of mutual aid • Read newly translated work by Mostafa Ibrahim • JD Vance is quoting one of Cormac McCarthy’s most evil characters •  Dorsía Silva Smith talks to Poets.org • Julian Zabalbeascoa on his family’s experience of the Spanish Civil War • Anna Farro Henderson on romance, distance, and marshlands • Ann Patchett introduces the annotated edition of Bel Canto • The connection between Black writing and Black resistance • The near-eternal lives of Greenland sharks • Juhea Kim, Daniel M. Lavery, Alan Lightman, and more authors take the Lit Hub questionnaire • Marguerite Sheffer talks to Jane Ciabattari • Meet the 2024 National Book Award finalists • Why Mirza Waheed is boycotting a screening of a film adapted from his novel • Art in the face of cataclysm and Bill T. Jones’s AIDS elegy Still/Here • Patrick Rosal sings the praises of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters • What’s true and what’s invented about our origins • How The Great Gatsby changed the landscape of New York City • How Wallis Simpson, future Duchess of Windsor, sought out divorce • Take a look at Ishion Hutchinson’s TBR • What you can learn from reading to your children • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Are you the asshole if you think your friend’s partner is a bad writer? • Padma Viswanathan considers doppelganger stories • Richard Munson remembers Benjamin Franklin’s scientific curiosity • Ed Simon on the Seven Deadly Sins • Dorsía Smith Silva recommends essential collections of ecopoetry • This week on The Lit Hub Podcast: Nancy Drew • The best reviewed books of the week • Read “Anthropology,” a poem by Ishion Hutchinson • Adrian Tomine gives advice to those trying to build a creative career • Jerry Brotton on how ancient cultures conceptualized the cardinal directions