Lit Hub Daily: September 24, 2024

Isabella Hammad recommends essential books about Palestine, featuring work by Jean Genet, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists How America’s gun violence epidemic affects us all: “I’m hoping against hope—but I won’t stop believing—I’ll even pray that, after Apalachee, everything will become different.” | Lit Hub Politics In praise of yearning, longing, and the hallmarks of over-the-top romance. | Lit Hub Craft

“I don’t think any new book appears out of nowhere, as if it materialized out of thin air or from the moon.” Olga Tokarczuk in conversation with translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones. | Lit Hub In Conversation

Richard Powers, Sally Rooney, Olga Tokarczuk and more! These new books are out today. | Lit Hub Reading Lists “They follow you around the store, these power ballads, / you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs.” Read “Whitney Houston,” a poem by August Kleinzahler. | Lit Hub Poetry They’re more than just spooky symbols of Halloween. On why bats are companions, protectors, and muses. | Lit Hub Nature Jane Ciabattari talks to Richard Powers about humanity’s relationships with nature and technology: “The oceans have changed profoundly and alarmingly in the half century since I last dove there, and much of the book is haunted by those changes.” | Lit Hub In Conversation Stuart Gibbs recommends 10 great books with strong tween characters (for tweens). | Lit Hub Reading Lists “We called it fencing. We had sex after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays when we told our parents the fencing team had practice.” Read from Elizabeth Roberts Architects: Collected Stories, a collaboration between the architect Elizabeth Roberts and the novelist Christine Coulson. | Lit Hub Fiction “His job now, as it has always been, is to speak truth to power, not figure out what one might actually do with it.” Ryu Spaeth profiles Ta-Nehisi Coates. | New York Magazine Esther Perel interviews Miranda July: “It doesn’t take very much reality to make something come alive. It’s like red food coloring or something — you just need a little drop, and suddenly the whole thing is pink.” | The Cut  Considering the movement for Palestine as student protesters return to campus. | n+1 From Gender Queer to This One Summer, Gina Gagliano examines the state of comics amid wave after wave of book bans. | The Comics Journal In the face of conservative book bans, schools are censoring themselves. | Slate “Even if there can be only one Rooney, her success speaks to the necessity of publishers meaningfully investing in debut voices.” Kate Dwyer considers the Sally Rooney effect. | TIME