Best of the Week: August 15 – 19, 2016

TODAY: In 1890, a happy-go-lucky H.P. Lovecraft was born. 

• President Obama has released his summer reading list, which includes The Underground Railroad, H is for Hawk, and Barbarian Days. | TIME
• “In America, one cannot—must not—ever discount the lowest sort of political urgings:” Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Smiley, and others recommend books to make sense of Donald Trump. | The Guardian
• “I believe in art the way other people believe in God.” An interview with Lidia Yuknavitch. | Lenny
• “I used the winch of poetry. I said that I needed a place of my own to write, which was true. But I also wanted to have freedom to lead my life and to fall in love and to do things I couldn’t do under my father’s roof.” Sandra Cisneros on moving into her first apartment. | NPR
• Not quite a myth, but mythologized: On the space the Underground Railroad occupies in the American imagination and the narratives we construct around it. | The New Yorker
• “In a world where queer individuals have been systematically brutalized by social and political forces, queer sex is a radical, brave act.” Garrard Conley on shame, sexuality, and safety. | BuzzFeed Reader
• “Diski’s voice has always been notable for its combination of cognitive power and a curiously impersonal intensity, but the analytic rage that motivates so much of her writing finally strikes me as expressing pain rather than judgment.” On Jenny Diski’s final book. | Public Books
• “Pariahness more likely meant every bad girl from every movie with bad girls. Red lipstick, fishnets, heels, leather, a cigarette maybe with a holder, platinum blonde or else jet black.” A short story by Porochista Khakpour. | Bennington Review
• On the rediscovery of Russian literary sensation Teffi, beloved by Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin alike. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Rose was her name and would she have been Rose if her name had not been Rose: Reading Gertrude Stein’s children’s book. | Slate
• Chelsea Hodson recommends five genre-combining/genre-creating books that elude classification. | Catapult
• “What fascinates me about Ferrante’s novels is the verisimilitude with which she portrays the working-class woman writer’s life.” Reading the Neapolitan novels as a first-generation academic. | VIDA
• “She always requested the strongest on offer. Lucky Strikes, Marlboro Reds.” Elizabeth Geoghegan on smoking with Lucia Berlin. | The Paris Review
• “We can work harder to mourn, get better at it, connect it better to how we live, how we care for people, how we educate people. It’s politics, for me.” A Q&A with Max Porter. | ZYZZYVA
• How the discovery of letters Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Foster raises questions about “the ethics of archival reconnaissance.” | The Boston Review

And on Literary Hub:

• The secret love of Edith Wharton’s life: on the mystery of Walter Van Rensselaer Berry.
• Reading the partition of India: from Midnight’s Children to In Freedom’s Shade, Anjali Enjeti discovers a harrowing history.
• On Xie Hong, master of Chinese unreality.
• What does “silence” mean in the age of digital noise? On Zeus, twitter, and mixed sensory metaphors.
• When was my mother no longer my mother? Confronting the loss of selfhood in the face of MS.
• Famous skeletons: Lydia Pyne on meeting the Taung Child and other celebrity fossils.
• It’s food day on Lit Hub! How is reviewing a restaurant like reviewing a book? Critics John Freeman and Robert Sietsema compare notes · Why The Futurist Cookbook was the first lifestyle blog · Five fictional vegetarians who defy stereotypes · What do chefs read? · Who’s meaner: book critics or restaurant reviewers? · How to arrange your kitchen, according to Julia Child · Ten literary dishes from great books.
• C.B. George warns of the dangerous myth of authenticity.
• Our favorite librarians recommend one more book to read before summer ends..
• You’re probably misreading Robert Frost’s most famous poem: on the many tricks and contradictions of “The Road Not Taken.”
• Why do I still care if the US men’s basketball team wins gold? Benjamin Markovits on winning streaks and the rest of the world.
• In praise of the micro landscape: Angela Palm learns to see in miniature.
• Anger, record-burnings, and the KKK: When the Beatles played Memphis, 50 years ago today.
• Rachel Hall on the grandfather she never knew, a French resistance fighter.

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