Best of the Week: May 2 – 6, 2016

TODAY: In 1940, Angela Olive Stalker (Angela Cater), “the Salvador Dalí of English letters,” is born. 

• Chasing the shifting and changing and searching ghost of James Baldwin. | NYRB
• Navigating an unsteady ground with ease: On Warsan Shire, Lemonade, and the ties between poetry and music. | Pitchfork
• I have come to talk to you about the future: Enrique Vila-Matas on Rock n’ Roll, anti-artists, and finding his way into a new book. | Music & Literature
• “[Jacqueline] Susann’s representation of drugs was unrepentant, insistent, and determined to demonstrate the ubiquity of drug taking for women at the time.” Looking back at the bestselling cult classic Valley of the Dolls, 50 years after its publication. | Broadly
• “I just object when anyone gets too comfortable in a tradition and neglects to question all of its conventions every time they set out to do anything.” Karan Mahajan interviews Adam Ehrlich Sachs. | Bookforum
• John Ashbery answers some “human being” type questions about being an art critic, crushes on boys, and the presence of “it.” | The Brooklyn Rail
• “The question of what posture to take toward our own pain is unexpectedly complicated.” Parul Sehgal on the narratives of survivors of sexual abuse. | The New York Times
• “There seems to be less and less underground. And what it’s replaced by is this very professional, shiny, happy plastic version of literature.” Jessa Crispin on the closing of Bookslut. | Vulture
• What killed Chris McCandless, and is he worthy of admiration? Jon Krakauer provides an update to Into the Wild. | Galleys
• My brain has not returned to normal: Claire Kilroy on motherhood, writer’s block, and postpartum jealousy. | Winter Pages
• “I seem to have gone to dances and been photographed in pretty dresses, and also as a pom-pom girl. I seemed to have been a bridesmaid rather a lot. I seem always to have been ‘the editor’ or the ‘president.’” Some notes on California by Joan Didion. | NYRB
• On Lee Konstantinou’s Cool Characters, ironic distancing, and meta Pepsi ads. | The Point
• Karl Ove Knausgaard on being a “cultural man,” reading women, and writing an almost evil book. | Men’s Journal
• More complicated than a flowering of one eccentric and filthy man’s erotic imagination: On John Cleland’s (very) erotic novel, Fanny Hill. | The Paris Review
• “This year I’m going to put on a big outfit and go to a party.” Zadie Smith on attending the Met Ball and what we can expect from her next novel (“tap dancing, black women, money, poverty, sadness and joy”). | Refinery29

And on Literary Hub:

• Lydia Millet on bad B&Bs, writing as a single-parent, and the presidential elections.
• How Billy Joel taught me to write.
• Why literature needs psychology.
• Live from the Edgars, crime writing’s big night, plus Walter Mosley’s lifetime acceptance speech from the awards.
• Fiction can still do anything it wants: Jennifer Egan on Don Delillo, and Don DeLillo on the life of a book.
• Adam Haslett on the eternal loneliness of the writer.
• On Don DeLillo’s deep Italian-American roots.
• Novel? Screenplay? Comic? How to choose the right medium for your story.
• Judy Blume changed my life: Lily King on the book that got her through her parents’ divorce.
• On the quest to write in a third language: Amara Lakhous dreams of green cheese and being reborn into New York City.
• Do you really want a free market? Robert B. Reich on power, big banks, and democracy.
• Andrew Solomon continues his phone call with Paul Holdengraber wherein they talk about global terrorism, travel writing, and empathy.
• Lydia Millet on why love is boring and hard to write about, and yet…
• What is the writer’s place in a violent world? Maaza Mengiste on Chinua Achebe.
• The 10 Russian literary heroines you should know.
• The sustenance of song and historical clapbacks: Adam Fitzgerald interviews Tyehimba Jess.
• Why does literature hate babies? Rivka Galchen on the sometimes reciprocal hostility between writing and children.
• Motherhood vs. Art: on having a child as a woman writer (there is no wrong choice).
• Reading (and writing) through the loss of a mother.

Copyright photograph by Tara Heinemann

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