Lit Hub Weekly: May 27 – 31, 2024

Lit Hub Daily

June 1

TODAY: In 1855, more than two million people join Victor Hugo's funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon following his death from pneumonia at 83.

Mark Harman on learning to understand both the surfaces and "subterranean passages" while attempting a new translation of Kafka. | Lit Hub On Translation
"As I became more entrenched in the White nationalist movement, I gained more power to cause more harm to people and society in ways I came to deeply regret." R. Derek Black on the extreme ideology of their upbringing and how young White nationalists are programmed to hate. | Lit Hub Politics
A tribute to Paul Auster, featuring Siri Hustvedt, Don DeLillo, JM Coetzee, and more. | Lit Hub
"I was a girl in the imagination of others and nowhere else." KB Brookins on masculinity, gender, and trauma. | Lit Hub Memoir
Take a look inside Alice Munro's notebooks, where the author "tinkered and experimented, made detours and sudden revisions—where she surveyed the whole field of possibility before committing herself to a full, typed version of a story." | The Paris Review
"I think in my poems grief is synonymous with connection. To give up the grief is to give up the connection." Hanif Abdurraqib interviews Diane Seuss. | The New Yorker
David Palumbo-Liu makes the case for boycotting Israeli universities: "Ignored by these arguments is the extent to which Israeli universities undermine Palestinian education." | Jacobin
"When I read the memoirs of AAPI writers and creators, I study more than just their craft—I study their career and life choices." On seeking guidance from those who came before you. | Los Angeles Review of Books
Morgan Talty considers the restrictiveness of blood quantum, and what it means for his son. | Esquire
Ashawnta Jackson explores the life and writing of Lucretia Howe Newman Coleman, a powerful voice in the Black press in the late 1800s who has largely faded from the record of women's history. | JSTOR Daily
Claire Messud talks to Joshua Cohen: "But I think in this particular time, in this 21st century, there is a real awareness of the colonial histories and legacies and how terrible they were." | Interview
"The writer may not be a 'powerless observer,' but it is political movements, not poets, who make history." Gustav Jönsson on the writers who survived fascism. | Jacobin
"I don't believe in isolated movements. I believe that everything is intertwined, and nothing stands separately. I want to be in everything." Read the 1980 interview between Dimitris Gkionis and Greek poet and actress Katerina Gogou, translated by Christina Chatzitheodorou. | Asymptote
Read the latest issue of Transition magazine, which tracks "the intimate relationship of the Diaspora to all forms of life." | Transition
Author Kate Dwyer explains why it's harder than ever for debut writers to break out. | Esquire
Read June Jordan's 1993 tribute to her friend and fellow activist, Audre Lorde (with an introduction by Alexis Pauline Gumbs). | Jewish Currents