Best of the Week: April 11 – 15, 2016

TODAY: In 1962, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is published. 

• Salman Rushdie on metamorphosing, multi-faceted work of the fathers of modern literature, Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare | The New Statesman
• A brief history of quality reporting by female writers: 56 nonfiction pieces by women journalists, from 1960 to today. | The Cut
• Beautiful and horrifying, terrible and transfixing: On Lina Meruane’s Seeing Red. | Full Stop
• The PEN Award winners (including Mia Alvar, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rick Barot) and the L.A. Times Book Prize winners (including Valeria Luiselli, Andrea Wulf, and Chigozie Obioma) have been announced, as has the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist. | PEN America, LA Times, BWPFF
• Hilton Als speaks with Maggie Nelson, “the poet who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious; the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale.” | The New Yorker
• “Figured it’d been a while, so he’d fill in/for the other old crusty white croutons/who ran out of nice flowers to muse on.” Franny Choi, Ali Eteraz, and other writers respond to Calvin Trillin’s “doggerel.” | AAWW
• Why is Karl Ove Knausgaard so damn sad? On Book Five of My Struggle. | The New Republic
• Satyricon remixed: The introduction and an excerpt from Blutch’s graphic novel Peplum, which is being published in English for the first time. | The Paris Review
• “We’re two writers in our forties with debut poetry books. At the risk of sounding snarky, but with a wink and a nudge, I’ll ask, ‘What took you so long?’” Michael Morse and Robin Beth Schaer in conversation. | The Rumpus
• “I am a living demonstration that what I wrote is true.” An interview with official Living Legend Mario Vargas Llosa. | The New York Times
• Celebrating the possibilities of facticity and the poeticization of form: On the writing of Maggie Nelson, Ben Lerner, and Brian Blanchfield and the revenge of poetry. | Flavorwire
• On Dorothy Parker’s “wit, flair, talent, and near genius for self-destruction.” | NYRB
• “It’s our job, as awake humans, not just as writers, to consider things. Ugly, uncomfortable things and beautiful, terrifying things.” Amelia Gray interviews Catherine Lacey. | The Tower
• “I crept back and forth on all fours across the overpass of Styx.” Ken Chen on visiting his father in the underworld. | Harriet
• “I met an oil man in Marfa and we talked about this a little bit, and he explained it was the family business. That’s all. Owning the earth, I guess.” Stephanie La Cava talks to Flavin Judd and Eileen Myles about the West Texas Trans-Pecos pipeline. | The Believer Logger

And on Literary Hub:

• At home in Deaf culture: Sara Novic on storytelling in an un-writable language.
• Why wasn’t Great American Novelist Jane Smiley on the cover of a magazine? Rumaan Alam on how we still judge women writers by a different standard.
• Justin Tussing on fandom, obsession, and collating badly printed images of Xena, Warrior Princess.
• Why my novel uses untranslated Chinese: Esmé Weijun Wang on the value of not-knowing.
• This violent world: lessons in coping from the writing of Aleksandar Hemon.
• The time Ben Warner almost died on the Appalachian Trail.
• Mississippi writers Kiese Laymon, Margaret Eby, Catherine Lacey, and Andrew Malan Milward on why they oppose their state’s new anti-LGBTQ “religious freedom” law.
• Melissa Broder: thoughts on open marriage and illness.
• Paul Holdengraber continues his call with Elif Bautman: on crying, taste, and writing a novel called “The Idiot.”
• Avoid the pathways to psychic pain: Dr. David A. Kessler on depression, David Foster Wallace, and capture theory.
• Karl Ove Knausgaard on early failure, faulty memory, and writing 20 pages a day.
• Adam Gopnik on the ur-gentrification story of Place des Vosges.
• Jon Ronson, in search of the genuinely new.
• Former first lady Louisa Catherine Adams’s conflicted early feminism.
• Feeling “ugly lonely”: a short story by the late Alan Cheuse, “The Burden.”
• In search of the darkest cult in American history: Laura Elizabeth Woollett on Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple.
• Yahdon Israel talks to fashion designer Charles Harbison on the books that influence him.

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