Best of the Week: January 25 – 29, 2016

TODAY: In 1815, the Library of Congress is reestablished (after burning down during the War of 1812) when Thomas Jefferson sells the bulk of his collection to the US government for $23,950. 

• I can live in letters: on the collected letters and many lovers of Iris Murdoch. | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• David Lipsky on the marriage of and letters to Vladimir-protector Vera Nabokov. | Harper’s Magazine
• “I have no ambition to save China.” An interview with Hong Kong publisher Bao Pu. | NYRB
• Shirley Jackson (the Empress of the Village Ghosts), Virginia Woolf (the Witch of the Waters, The Porcelain, The Lexicon), and other literary witches, illustrated. | Okey-Panky
• “While reading Tranströmer’s work, just before I started translating him, I often felt that he was speaking to me.” An interview with Patty Crane, Tomas Tranströmer’s most recent translator. | The Paris Review
• It begins as an opera would begin: The first chapter of Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night. | Longreads
• Toxic rivers and poisonous mines: five books to better understand the Flint water crisis. | Signature Reads
• “Pages rarely tremble with such life as when expressing their author’s death.” On the end-of-life memoir. | The New Yorker
• We’ve all won the Powerball, in a way: 2666 has been adapted into a play that will approximate the experience of “binge-watching Bolaño,” according to its directors. | The New York Times
• Et to & to and per se and: The history and poetics of the ampersand. | Harriet
• See the SOUL of NERUDA for only $5: Ariel Lewiton on seeking proximity to miracles in the homes of Pablo Neruda. | Catapult
• “Fractality of a literary text will in practice never be as perfect as in the world of mathematics,” brag the mathematicians who took it upon themselves to look for fractal structures in classic books. | The Guardian
• Monologue and self-fictionalization: On the identity and writing of J.M Coetzee. | The Nation
• Why chew your own cabbage twice? Elon Green on learning from Saul Bellow. | Hazlitt
• It’s not all doom and gloom: Matt Gallagher on Hemingway pronouncements, and survival mechanisms, writing as an artist/veteran. | BOMB Magazine

And on Literary Hub:

• Oleg Kashin wrote a satirical novel of Putin’s Russia—soon after, he was beaten within an inch of his life. Will Evans, Kashin’s translator, tells the story…
• Elizabeth McKenzie on “surrealist” word games, nitrous oxide, and novel writing as an act of decomposition.
• Bridget Read on why the biased, mean, and brilliant Janet Malcolm actually hates the new Ted Hughes biography.
• “We would never have a monkey behave like that in a Japanese children’s book.” Marie Mutsuki Mockett on fairytales and storytelling from East to West.
• Sunil Yapa on race, writing, and empathy as a radical act.
• A Phone Call from Paul: Wild author Cheryl Strayed on sex, grief, and joy.
• An interview with a 32-year-old Nora Ephron: “I don’t have writer’s block, really.”
• Garth Greenwell talks about sex, passion, and the queer body.
• “Mom, I’m taking opiates again.”  Amy Long on life with addiction.
• Zinzi Clemmons asks where is our black avant garde?

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