June 10 in Books: Pilgrimages, Perceptions, and the Fiction of Real Life
On this date in 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy laced up peasant clothes and walked off toward a monastery, traveling incognito on a religious pilgrimage – a detail that sits comfortably alongside today’s literary lineup, which is full of writers wearing other people’s lives like borrowed coats.
Writers Inside Other Lives
Sofia Montrone opens up in Lit Hub Biography about the unusual path to knowing her own grandfather – not through memory or family lore, but through fiction. “Before I was a writer with characters of my own, I was imagining Ben,” she writes. It’s the kind of admission that collapses the distance between biography and invention, suggesting that for some writers, making things up is the most honest form of research available.
Over at Lit Hub Memoir, the subject is Jim Jacobs, identified in historical record as the man who killed the last Eastern Elk in America. The piece is framed around “The Seneca Bear Hunter” – a figure whose legacy sits at the uncomfortable intersection of frontier mythology and ecological loss. Chera Hammons extends that discomfort further in a separate essay, drawing explicit parallels between how humans treat each other and how they treat the natural world. The two pieces, read together, form an accidental diptych about what gets destroyed in the name of conquest, whether the target is an animal or a person.
Helen Bain contributes a travel-inflected piece tracing Sylvia Plath’s movements from Paris to Wellesley. Following a writer’s geography is its own genre – part literary criticism, part pilgrimage – and Bain’s piece arrives on the same day we’re reminded that Tolstoy once did something not entirely different, trading his title for plain clothes and open road. The echo isn’t forced; both stories are about the gap between who a person is publicly and what they’re searching for privately.
Lit Hub Art takes on the history of dogs in painting, arguing that the real subject of dog portraiture has always been human psychology – status, loyalty, sentiment, control. What artists chose to paint, and how, reveals their patrons more clearly than any formal portrait could. Dogs don’t commission paintings. People do.
Sex, Soccer, Race, and the Problem with COVID Fiction
Brodie Crellin’s reading list for Lit Hub is the kind that arrives with an implicit dare: six books featuring what Crellin calls “actually realistic” sex, pulling from writers including Robert Gluck, Nicholson Baker, and Sheila Heti. The framing matters – “actually realistic” is a quiet indictment of how badly most literary fiction handles physical intimacy, defaulting to either clinical distance or baroque metaphor. The list functions as both recommendation and argument.
Tobias Carroll reviews Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration for Lit Hub Criticism, describing it as “possibly the strangest soccer novel ever written.” That qualifier does a lot of work. Soccer fiction is already a narrow room; a novel that earns the word “strangest” inside that room is operating at some remove from realism. Carroll’s piece doesn’t flatten the book into a curiosity – it takes the strangeness seriously as a formal choice rather than an accident.
Namwali Serpell’s essay in The Yale Review reframes how readers approach Toni Morrison’s use of racial stereotypes. Serpell’s argument is that focusing solely on whether Morrison employs stereotypes, without accounting for the formal structures she builds around them, produces an incomplete and often wrong reading. “When we focus solely on a writer’s use of stereotypes, and overlook the formal choices she makes in how she uses them, we neglect the ways that literature can play with and in fact subvert stereotypes.” It’s a methodological correction as much as a literary one – a reminder that craft and content are not separable categories. This connects directly to ongoing critical conversations about how Morrison’s work gets read and taught across changing cultural contexts.
Morgan Leigh Davies, writing in Current Affairs, lands the bluntest critique of the day: COVID novels have largely gotten it wrong. The essay doesn’t name specific titles, but the charge is structural – that fiction set during the pandemic has misread what the experience actually felt like from the inside. Leila Slimani’s novel I’ll Take the Fire, translated by Sam Taylor, offers one possible counter-example. An excerpt published by Lit Hub Fiction opens in November 2021, with a narrator who has lost their sense of taste and smell: “One night in November 2021, I lost my sense of taste and smell. There was a woman sleeping in my bed. I licked her shoulder, buried my nose in her neck.” It’s a passage about sensory absence that manages to be more viscerally present than most prose written about that period.
Sloane Crosley’s piece in The New Yorker is about misophonia – the condition in which specific sounds trigger intense, often disproportionate distress. Crosley describes it as agony, which is not hyperbole to anyone who has it. Separately, Ria Banerjee examines the films of Chantal Akerman through a Woolfian lens in Public Books, tracing the ways Akerman’s formal methods – duration, silence, domestic space – echo techniques more commonly associated with literary modernism than cinema.
Campus Protests, Heavy Metal, and Killing Your Darlings Properly
Defector asks a question nobody else seems to be asking: what is happening with Heavy Metal magazine? The comics publication has had a turbulent few years, and the piece treats the uncertainty as a genuine loss worth investigating rather than a footnote. Meanwhile, at Lit Hub Craft, someone makes the case that “killing your darlings” – the old writing advice about cutting beloved but unnecessary passages – doesn’t go far enough. Why merely kill them when you can murder them? It’s a small tonal shift that carries real editorial conviction.
The piece from Defector about the 2024 Columbia University student protests draws a direct line between campus security responses and the security theater visible at Madison Square Garden events: “What started as an extravagant use of force became a normal part of student life.” That normalization – the way extraordinary measures stop feeling extraordinary – is exactly what makes the comparison to a sports venue’s crowd control feel less absurd than it sounds. Whether the comics industry’s slow institutional drift follows the same logic is the question the Heavy Metal piece leaves hanging, unanswered, on the page.
