Best of the Week: April 18 – 22, 2016

TODAY: In 1597, The Merry Wives of Windsor is first performed, with Queen Elizabeth I in attendance. 

• The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners include Viet Thanh Nguyen, T.J. Stiles, and William Finnegan. | The Pulitzer Prizes, Literary Hub
• A writer can never be on the side of killing: Syrian poet Adonis on revolution, religion, and renaissances. | NYRB
• Of Gertrude Stein and the redundancy of war: On Don Mee Choi’s collection of poetry, prose, and opera, Hardly War. | BOMB Magazine
• “The problem is so systemic, ingrained, and complex that it’s hard to decide where to start tackling it.” More on diversity in publishing (and a suggestion that unionizing could help). | Broadly, The Nation
• “The result of this is, when you try to write about guns in America, you can’t bother to use the news peg approach. Any peg you choose goes by too quickly, replaced by another.” Alexander Chee on America’s gun culture. | Longreads
• Books by two of the earliest women writers in English, including the first English autobiography, are being displayed together for the first time. | The Guardian
• The cover of George Saunders’s first full-length novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and his thoughts on finally writing one (I’m just gonna discharge it). | Vulture
• Scholar Michael Maar shares his theory of Lolita, which holds that it makes coded references to an unimportant, Nazi-supporting German writer. | The Paris Review
• From Stendhal to Sherman Alexie, 14 non-Knausgaardian writers of autofiction. | Public Books
• In honor of National Poetry Month, ten designers animated the poetry of Tracy K. Smith, Patricia Lockwood, and others. | The Washington Post
• On John D’Agata’s and David Shields’ lofty ambitions for the lyric essay, freed from the tyranny of both make-believe and fact. | Harper’s Magazine
• “Winterson’s work offered me a safe house in my war with my own body.” How hearing Jeanette Winterson speak at AWP saved SJ Sindu’s life. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• The New Yorker writers pay tribute to Prince and “his music, his spirit, his playfulness, his petulance, his bravery, his youth, his wisdom, his weirdness, his virtuosity, and his vision.” | The New Yorker
• Margaret Atwood, Gillian Flynn, and 22 others share their fondest Shakespeare memories. | Signature Reads
• Idra Novey on translating daydreams about goat udders and “the immense pleasure of blushing at the wildness” of her own writing. | Catapult

And on Literary Hub:

• Poetry Day on Lit Hub: Jay Parini investigates if Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” was really about Donald Trump; Charles Bernstein on Larry Eigner: how an obscure poet with cerebral palsy influenced an entire generation; Loma calls for a new kind of literary activism; From Tommy Pico’s book-length poem, IRL; “Every poem I write is about Ted Cruz”: Gabriel Ojeda-Sague on poetry, Santería, and not feeling Latino “enough”; Remembering the great C.D. Wright and how she used poetry to address injustice; 30 contemporary poets you should be reading; Five Pacific Islander poets: a folio curated by Craig Santos Perez; Two new poetry podcasts for your listening pleasure.
• How science fiction redefines who we are and what we are becoming.
• The story of one writer’s path from prison to publication: part one of Mitchell S. Jackson’s documentary, The Residue Years; Part two of Mitchell Jackson’s documentary; And the conclusion of Mitchell Jackson’s autobiographical documentary, The Residue Years.
• How I write history (or, a window into my crazy). Neal Bascomb on quilt-making, research, and structuring historical narrative.
• Marta Bausells on the perks of getting lost at the London Book Fair.
• Eric Fair on practicing “enhanced interrogation techniques,” now known as torture, for the US Government.
• “Running a boatyard is like working in a dementia clinic”: from Jim Lynch’s new novel, Before the Wind.
• Karl Ove Knausgaard drives around with his two-year-old daughter, talks to Paul Holdengraber about parenthood, phenomenology, and not really caring what America thinks.
• How to write teen girl characters.
• What Borges learned from Cervantes: on language and the thin line between fiction and reality.
• If Jane Eyre came out today would it be marketed as genre?
• Charlotte Brontë may have started the fire, but Jean Rhys burned down the house: Bridget Read on the limits of Brontë feminism
• Searching for salvation in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.
• Prince: Alexander Chee, Naomi Jackson, and Kaitlyn Greenidge remember the artist formerly known as.
• Voices from the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature: Edward Snowden, Aminatta Forna, Mona Eltahawy, and Tom Stoppard.
• Rebecca Schiff on her abnormally quiet Jewish family.
• What kind of day job should a writer have?

 

---