Best of the Week: April 27 – May 1, 2015

TODAY: On Independent Bookstore Day, we celebrate Sylvia Beach and her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. Here, she’s hanging out with her friends James Joyce and Adrienne Monnier in 1920. 

• “What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization.” A case for serializing novels as a method to resuscitate the publishing industry. | The Washington Post
• Newly released documents indicate that Federico García Lorca was killed on government orders. | The Guardian
• In truth, we are all just characters in the Karl Ove Knausgaard story that is life (even you, Jeffrey Eugenides). | The New York Times
• Acknowledging “the gap between what really was or is, and what is said about it”: on the poetry and translations of Sawako Nakayasu. | Hyperallergic
• Measuring dicks, both literally and metaphorically: on Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s sexual anxieties. | The Paris Review
• “Does that make sense / Or should I describe it with my hands.” Poetry by Ben Lerner. | A Public Space
• “The Archive” by Sebastià Jovani, broken down into data and represented as diagrams. | Granta<
• “The people now calling for nonviolence… can offer no rational justification for Gray’s death and so they appeal for calm.” Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to official calls for nonviolence in Baltimore. | The Atlantic
• The War of the Worlds, our first Viral Media Event, similarly anticipated fun Internet trends. | Vanity Fair
• “Kim Gordon vs. Courtney Love: on two rock icons’ relationships to feminism, class, and vulgarity. | n+1
• Over two dozen writers (now 145), including Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lorrie Moore, have joined the protest against PEN’s decision to present Charlie Hebdo with the Freedom of Expression Courage award, although it’s unclear who gave them everyone’s email address. | TIME, The Guardian, Salon
• In response to the growing controversy, PEN is hosting a panel with Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief, Gérard Biard. | PEN America
• “One of the ways I’d always described the book… was as a piece of ombré cloth: something that began on one end as a bright, light bluish-white, and ended as something so dark it was nearly black.” The images that inspired Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. | Vulture
• “What a use to make of his affliction, he’d afterward think, exhausted, yet elated.” A short story by Joyce Carol Oates. | BOMB Magazine
• Have you ever wondered who the real Mr. Darcy was?  Has the most basic of your friends?  Here is your answer. | The Telegraph
• Today is Independent Bookstore Day; here is a round-up of events that are occurring nationwide (and information about ours). | Melville House, Bookstore Day NYC
• Books on music and music on books: an interview with Philip Glass. | The New York Times
• The Guggenheim has put 109 archival art books online for free, complete with a very life-like page-turning sensation. | The Guggenheim
• Thanks, Obama (really, though): the White House is providing $250 million in free e-books to low-income students. | Voice of America
• On the openness of New York City, narrative structure, and memories: an interview with Teju Cole. | The Oyster Review

 
And on Literary Hub:

• Jamie Kornegay is a method writer, experiments with burning bones. | Literary Hub
• Mark Ferguson, on being a debut novelist: “It is well documented that to publish a book (and especially a first novel) tends to make a person go temporarily insane.” | Literary Hub
• When Antonio Ruiz-Camacho began writing in English at 35, he wondered “Why is it uninvited instead of non-invited?” | Literary Hub
• Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation about his debut novel, The Sympathizer, on the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. | Literary Hub
• What are the politics of oversharing? A discussion between Sarah Gerard and Ben Fama on influence, the balance of candor and artificiality, and public personae. | Literary Hub

 

---