Best of the Week: October 5 – 9, 2015

TODAY: In 1896, The New York Times publishes its first book review section, which will eventually become The New York Times Book Review.

• Why the Nobel Prize deservedly went to Svetlana Alexievich, emotional excavator, genre inventor, and fourteenth woman recipient. | The New Yorker
• A newsletter of one’s own: why women writers are increasingly turning to TinyLetter. | New York Magazine
• Bad sex writing from the last of the famous international playboys. | The Guardian
• “I don’t ever hold back / on anything.” Found poems by Pasha Malla and Jeff Parker. | n+1
• The scramble for Gabriel Garcia Marquez after his literary agent, Carmen Balcells aka La Mamá Grande’s, death last month. | The New York Times
• Jenny Diski articulates the question on all our minds: “WHAT THE FUCK DID I HAVE TO HAVE ALL THAT SHIT FOR?” | London Review of Books
• One of the world’s oldest written narratives–The Epic of Gilgamesh–gets a 20-line update. | Open Culture
• A profile of Garth Risk Hallberg, creator of “an object machine-tooled for maximum market impact” (City on Fire). | Vulture
• Slogging through and immersing oneself in the linguistic landscape of The Wake. | Music & Literature
• “You are like a magician: you see something others don’t see.” On the undervalued importance of literary translators. | Financial Times
• This holiday season, show your favorite bookstore employee how much you care with a James Patterson-funded bonus. | American Booksellers Association
• On Slaughterhouse 90210, a “real live cultural argument” presented with “a wink and a dose of wit.” | NPR
• “There was no model for us brown girls. I’d never known any women of letters.” An interview with Sandra Cisneros. | Jezebel
• In which a former 24-year-old Brooklyn book nerd (Peter Nowogrodzki) and more than a literary meme (Ottessa Moshfegh) recount the past, work through their relationship, and discuss cars. | Full Stop
• Poetry Day has provided us with Stephen Hawking reading Sarah Howe and Boromir reading Dylan Thomas, among other things. | National Poetry Day

And on Literary Hub:

• How to read your way through postpartum. | Literary Hub
• Jeanette Winterson on writing a cover version of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. | Literary Hub
• Don Quixote is sloppy, confusing, inconsistent, and otherwise wonderful. Ilan Stavans on the 400th anniversary of a classic. | Literary Hub
• In episode three of our new(ish) podcast, A Phone Call From Paul, Paul Holdengräber suggests that maybe Claudia Rankine “is a bit of a stranger stalker” actually. | Literary Hub
• Kenzaburo Oe gets stuck on a street corner in America and finds a hero in Huckleberry Finn. | Literary Hub
• Alice Randall thinks The Southern Festival of Books is better than Christmas. | Literary Hub

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