Best of the Week: April 25 – 29, 2016

TODAY: In 65, Silver Age poet Lucan dies. 

• Like conceding that Hooters does, actually, have excellent wings: On reading John Updike for the first time as a woman. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• In case you had any doubts: winning the Pulitzer does wonders for book sales. | TIME
• Finding the ghosts of Detroit on Google Maps: A profile of debut author Angela Flournoy. | BuzzFeed Books
• “The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.” A short story by Alexandra Kleeman. | The New Yorker
• The history and future of New Directions, from Ezra Pound’s advice to “do something useful” on. | Asymptote
• Neither adolescent contrarianism nor camp, and certainly not diva worship: Rumaan Alam on his very sincere love of Yoko Ono. | The Millions
• Hilton Als on the time-traveling art of Octavia Butler, Cecil Taylor, and Beyoncé. | The New Yorker
• 30 years after Chernobyl, reflecting on literature’s attempts at and language’s inadequacy in conveying the immensity of the disaster. | The Atlantic
• “What I saw was Prince seeing women as collaborators, co-workers; they were essential in art and life, and creators in every sense of the word.” Porochista Khakpour on Prince’s women. | The Village Voice
• Tony Tulathimutte on the “high priest of the American apocalypse,” Don DeLillo (and on Late Night: Seth Myers, on a bunch of t-shirts). | The New Republic, NBC
• “The Queen always looked profound when she pooped.” A short story by Helen Phillips. | Electric Literature
• “Don’t listen to the words—/they’re only little shapes for what you’re saying.” Six poetry publishers share their favorite poetic lines. | Consortium Bookslinger
• “When I’m at work, it’s strictly sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph.” An interview with Don DeLillo and excerpt from Zero K. | The Wall Street Journal
• #BlackNarrativesMatter: John Keene on the importance of translating non-Anglophone black diasporic authors. | Harriet
• “The thing that makes me happiest is a lot of people have told me my writing has given them permission to do or feel different things.” Discussing theory with Maggie Nelson, featuring illustrations by Harry Dodge. | The Lifted Brow

And on Literary Hub:

• In honor of the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death, we went deep: One hell of a literary era: beyond Shakespeare: a reading list · Jillian Keenan on Hamlet, a bro who didn’t even like sex · In praise of remixing Shakespeare (and why the Bard would have approved of contemporary retellings) · Ilan Stavans offers a new version of English literature’s most famous scene, Hamlet in Spanglish · What was Shakespeare’s central philosophy? · Shakespeare and his stuff, understanding the artist through his things.
• My father the song poet: Kao Kalia Yang comes to understand her machinist father as a literary force.
• Summer Brennan attempts Marie Kondo’s approach to tidying up her library, learns the heartbreaking difficulty of getting rid of books.
• Sad books that rip your soul to pieces, and why we love reading to cry.
• A prodigal daughter returns to Dublin: “Mr. Salary,” a short story by Sally Rooney from Granta’s New Irish Writing issue.
• George Plimpton, the original master of none: from the ice rink to the boxing ring to the ballpark, a writer who tried it all.
• How Sylvia Plath’s rare honors thesis helped me understand my divided self.
• Marlon James on soccer, Jesmyn Ward on football, Hanya Yanagihira on hockey: ten writers and the sports they should write about.
• The other White Flight: when college kids went back to the land.
• Andrew Solomon talks to Paul Holdengraber about violence, isolationism, and the art of travel.
• Mythic Scandinavian utopias are a thing of the past: Zinzi Clemmons on why Nordic social democracy cannot solve the world’s problems.
• The joys (and perils) of literary tourism.
• Lisa Lucas on ten more musicians who could be novelists.
• Half-truth and reconciliation: after the Rwandan Genocide.
• The literary friendship of Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane.
• Remembering Jenny Diski: from Michelle Dean, Joanna Walsh, Charlotte Shane, Haley Mlotek, Rumaan Alam and more.
• 16 books Lit Hub is looking forward to in May.
• Women detectives in fact and fiction: on the first female sleuth and the evolution of detective fiction.
• Infiltrating literature’s secret societies: Tobias Carroll on our fascination with all-powerful, unseen institutions.

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