Best of the Week: May 18 – 22, 2015

TODAY: In 1943, Thomas Mann begins writing Dr. Faustus; here he is with his wife, Katia. 

• E-books are allowing publishers in Iran to get around stringent censorship laws, which forbid words like “kiss,” “dance,” and “wine.” | The Guardian
• Buenos Aires has the most bookstores per capita (4,000 people : 1 bookstore); here are the secrets to their success. | Melville House
• Kazuo Ishiguro on the battle of memory, the pressure to produce, and the long haul of love. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Crystallizing slush piles: suggestions on how literary magazines could better accept submissions. | Electric Literature
• Shakespeare, sadly, may not have actually looked like a business-casual pirate. | BBC
• On the heartbreak of attempting to bridge “the gap of the untranslatable, the cultural, the past, the future” through translation. | Publishing Perspectives
• Allegory to potato planting to the page: Cynan Jones on his writing process, reading habits, and American reception. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
• Listicles have been around since the 1800s, at least. The Lascaux Caves could be a listicle, for all we know. | Nieman Lab
• Sausages vs. salamis, Internet love vs. life, bad habits vs. other bad habits: five stories from Lydia Davis. | Five Dials
• Italy is celebrating Dante’s 750^th birthday by creating its own circle of Hell on earth (a nationwide selfie campaign). | The New Yorker
• “Traffic is a perennial struggle,” “the weed here is not for lightweights,” “beautiful people get away with practically anything,” and other facts you may not know about L.A., excerpted from City by City. | N+1
• “Like Xanther has this cat in her hands at the end of the book, the book is like the cat in people’s hands.” So much depends upon our reading of The Familiar: an interview with Mark Z. Danielewski. | The Rumpus
• We, not Philip Roth, are the egotists in his non-retirement; it is clearly all about us. | The Baffler
• If you’re very invested ($3.8 million) in showing that you really loved 12th grade AP Literature, you can now buy the house in which F. Scott Fiztgerald wrote The Great Gatsby. | CBC News
• Matriarchal figures, sexual appetites, and rejecting literary canons: an interview with Anne Enright, Ireland’s inaugural fiction laureate. | The Millions

And on Literary Hub:

• André Alexis catalogs all 21 animals that inspired his novel, Fifteen Dogs (not a listicle, no puppies). | Literary Hub
• Meet Sergio Pitol, Mexico’s “total writer.” | Literary Hub
• “The first time I met my new therapist I did not know she believed in fairies.” | Literary Hub
• We announced the winners of the O. Henry Prizes for 2015 on Thursday. Read prize-winning stories from Dina Nayeri, Christopher Merkner, Molly Antopol, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. | Literary Hub
• On the fine art of not destroying your career while on your debut book tour. | Literary Hub

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