Best of the Week: April 4 – 8, 2016

TODAY: In 1768, Sarah Fielding, author of the first novel in English written specifically for children, The Little Female Academy (published anonymously as “by a Lady”), dies. 

• Claudia Rankine’s AWP keynote speech addressing “what keeps us uncomfortable in each other’s presence.” | Vulture
• Experimental fiction for her: On You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and other recent avant-garde fiction focusing on the female experience. | Public Books
• I sit down at the desk and I type: Lydia Davis, Ann Goldstein, and other esteemed literary translators share their processes. | The Wall Street Journal
• “I want to say something stronger than that: not just that cruising made me a poet, but also that cruising itself is a kind of poetry.” Garth Greenwell on the poetics of cruising. | BuzzFeed Books
• Beyond the “no-one-reads-anymore hysteria, the lack of supportive careers for apprenticing writers, the MFA deathtrap:” Jessa Crispin on the crisis of book criticism. | Copper Nickel
• “Such categorization of an entire community as an insidious poison is a move we have seen before.” Teju Cole on Charlie Hebdo’s Islamophobic editorial. | Brittle Paper
• “I thought it was such a misfit, but it’s turning out to be a lot more popular than the kid I thought it was.” James Hannaham on winning the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. | The Washington Post, PEN/Faulkner Foundation
• “She explained surgery, and cancer, and remission, and we asked questions. Then we all went out for pizza.” Kate Bolick on her mother’s, and her own, breast cancer. | The New Yorker
• Charles Bock, Manuel Gonzales, Charlotte Rogan, Rebecca Schiff, and Rob Spillman on their books, influences, and worst critiques. | Salon
• A countdown to the Man Booker Prize in interviews with the finalists, beginning with the writers and translators of The Four Books, Tram 83, and White Hunger. | Words Without Borders
• “To commit to making a book, you have to confront a despair about whatever you’ve done in the previous years it took to get there.” An interview with Hilton Als. | The Brooklyn Rail
• “We–readers, reviewers, publishers–have forgotten how to engage with African novels except from the standpoint of the social or political issues they address.” On the ways in which we talk about African fiction. | The Guardian
• “Finding it right now is almost crazy… like spotting a panda.” Just preceding the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, a new First Folio has been discovered. | The New York Times
• “Local news: the Iliad. What else.” A new poem by C.D. Wright. | Oxford American
• “They’ve seen the whole arch, holed up in my bedroom when I was a little kid just trying to rhyme, trying to figure out how to write poems. And they’re seeing it all come to fruition now.” An interview with Ohio’s first ever Poet Laureate, Amit Majmudar. | NPR

And on Literary Hub:

• From Vietnam to Iraq: Viet Thanh Nguyen on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dark prophecy.
• The magic of Syrian food before the war, from the table to the street.
• In conversation with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, the “oldest living debut novelist.”
• Siri Hustvedt, Helen Macdonald, A. L. Kennedy and others on the poems that make them cry.
• On reissuing Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts, ten years later.
• How to prescribe poems for the sick, the dying, the grief-stricken.
• The Tournament of Literary Sex Writing: Judges John Ashbery and Walter Mosley decide the final four.
• Fundamentalist Christian Kelly Kerney discovers the greater world, follows it all the way to Guatemala.
•  Scott Cheshire reads Dambudzo Marechera’s Scrapiron Blues, is reacquainted with the violent ghosts of his past.
• Elif Batuman talks to Paul Holdengraber about her aversion to telephones and the alienation of the hyphenated American.
• The greatest writers’ group in the history of Iowa.
• The bookstore fights back: Ann Patchett on the birth of Parnassus Books.
• Fatima Bhutto on the library of her grandfather, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
• A. Igoni Barrett on Nigeria, language, and striving for the universal.
• Announcing the first ever winner of The Tournament of Literary Sex Writing…
• Can the “literary” survive technology? Sven Birkerts on our changing brains and what comes next.
• Alexander Pschera on the digital closeness between humans and animals, and birds as Facebook friends.

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