Lit Hub Daily: Best-reviewed books of the week

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TODAY: In 1908, Salvadoran poet Vicente Acosta dies on his birthday.

Tarot reader Lisa Stardust examines Sylvia Plath’s relationship to her deck . | Lit Hub Criticism

How the expectation that “books are now asked to function simultaneously as texts and as lifestyle objects” influences cover design in the social media era. | Lit Hub Design

“It’s only a question of whether you’re looking through a telescope or a microscope.” Michael Cunningham on making peace with the scale of your work. | Lit Hub Craft

Lara Norgaard remembers translating the queer poetics of Cris Judar’s They Marched Under the Sun. | Lit Hub On Translation

Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine , Michael Cuningham’s Unsayable , and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Yellow Pine all feature among the best reviewed books of the week . | Book Marks

“As if in / moments lay / plummets.” Read “Drinking the Bees,” a poem by Christian Wiman from the collection The Dance . | Lit Hub Poetry

“It started with a toaster and ended with a Maytag washerdryer combo and four new steel-belted radials.” Read “You’ve Told Me This Joke Before” from George Singleton’s new collection, Wounded Boarders . | Lit Hub Fiction

“The play, he insisted, strove to avoid definition. This strategy of avoidance leaves us to gaze at a landscape void of meaning, one that by turns is the source of our bemusement and amusement.” Robert Zaretsky on Waiting for Godot . | The American Scholar

What does a Homerist think of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey ? | Hyperallergic

Athar Abu Samra writes about returning home to Gaza. | The Nation

In case you need something else to worry about, everyone is judging your bookcase . | Salon

“I did love New York, but I love New York more now after writing about it for seven years in this certain kind of way.” Natalie Weiner interviews Colson Whitehead. | Defector