Lit Hub Weekly: March 27–31, 2023

Lit Hub Daily

Apr 1

TODAY: In 1816, Jane Austen responds to a letter from the Prince Regent suggesting she write a historic romance, saying, "I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life."

Allegra Hyde considers the "slippery, maddening, even disastrous" task of ending a story. | Lit Hub Craft & Advice
How illustrated children's books played a part in social evolution. | Lit Hub
And we think egg prices are bad now: Lizzie Stark recounts the 1848 Egg War of San Francisco, when miners paid—in today's dollars—hundreds per dozen. | Lit Hub History
Jess Row on what fiction can teach us about surviving the slow apocalypse: "That deficit is our failure to imagine, and grapple with, solidarity." | Lit Hub
Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood, Catherine Lacey's Biography of X, and Matthew Desmond's Poverty, by America all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Month. | Book Marks
Josh Weiss recommends 10 alternative history thrillers. | CrimeReads
Why we get "book hangovers." | Reader's Digest
Ibram X. Kendi considers the crisis of the intellectuals: "The traditional construct of the intellectual has produced and reinforced bigoted ideas of group hierarchy—the most anti-intellectual constructs existing." | The Atlantic
Publishers are preparing for a showdown with Silicon Valley over ChatGPT and other AI tools. | The Wall Street Journal
Agatha Christie is getting a contemporary rewrite. | The Independent
The manuscript thief has been ordered to be deported (and to pay $88,000 in restitution to Penguin Random House). | The New York Times
Gabrielle Zevin's best-selling novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow has sparked a debate about credit in fiction. | The Washington Post
Elizabeth Kolbert on the con artists of the animal kingdom. | The New Yorker
Rapid-fire book recs from Clint Smith. | ELLE
Forget Lord of the Flies: Yellowjackets is remaking a Greek myth. | JSTOR Daily
"The writer told the court he was suffering depression at the time of signing the deal and had drunk several glasses of wine." A Dutch court has ruled that, despite his protests, Michel Houellebecq's appearance in an arthouse porn was completely above board. | DutchNews
"My marriage was never the same after that poem." Maggie Smith on how career success impacted her home life. | The Cut
New York State has been ordered to pay $5.5 million to Anthony J. Broadwater, who was wrongfully accused and imprisoned for the 1981 rape of writer Alice Sebold. | AP News
"When I went to summer camp, it was like, 'How am I gonna get through eight weeks here and never touch my special place?'" A conversation with the one and only Judy Blume. | Variety
"Low energy conservative influencers, dressed in business casual outfits, awkwardly reading (and explaining) their own stories off PowerPoint…" When conservatives try to have a children's story hour. | The Daily Dot
"I read Wuthering Heights twice and found it demented." Real talk from Louise Kennedy. | The Guardian