Best of the Week: August 1 – 5, 2016

TODAY: In 1868, Paul Claudel, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in six different years, is born [pictured here with Paul Petit]. 

• An antidote to clickbait: Why the essay, which foregrounds “questioning rather than certainty, experiment and mistake rather than polish and self-satisfaction,” is today’s ideal literary form. | Los Angeles Times
• “For the most part, motherhood is simply missing from our literary and philosophical tradition, passed over quickly as if it were an embarrassment when it even appears at all.” On the lack of literature about pregnancy and childbirth. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “It’s a triumph for good books, published with passion.” Speaking with independent publishers whose books have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize. | The Guardian
• On the stones, by the sea: On literary pilgrimages and the fertility of holiday boredom. | The Paris Review
• On “the Anne Frank tropes” in the fiction of Philip Roth, Nathan, Englander and Shalom Auslander. | Signature Reads
• God : hope :: ____ : _____: Samuel Beckett’s SAT questions. | The Point
• Rape culture is just culture-culture: Amy Gentry on agency, victimhood, and rape narratives in Western culture. | Electric Literature
• Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad has been announced as the next selection for Oprah’s Book Club and is available for sale over a month ahead of its original publication date. | CBS
• Forgive me for this awful hurt: Masha Hamilton writers a letter to an ex-lover, on the occasion of his suicide. | Longreads
• “I thought, why not write the book that really scares you?” An interview with Colson Whitehead. | The New York Times
• Edmund White on Pale Fire, Nabokov’s “funny and sometimes tender portrait of a homosexual madman.” | The Times Literary Supplement
• “What does it mean when white audiences are suddenly so eager to consume narratives of black suffering?” Britt Bennett on the history and current incarnations of the slave narrative. | The New Republic
• Retracing the 1927 road trip that cemented the friendship between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. | Oxford American
• On the Matilda Effect, the continued overlooking of women’s achievements, and the female figures history forgot. | Hazlitt
• A conversation between summer people: On the homonymous short stories of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link. | Longreads

And on Literary Hub:

• Nine classics of literary war porn: Roy Scranton on artfulness and the horrors of war.
• Obama, America, and the legacy of James Alan McPherson: Whitney Terrell remembers his friend and mentor.
• How a vegetarian Canadian inhabited the voice of legendary American frontiersman Daniel Boone.
• Leigh Stein on how to end a memoir without getting married.
• 18 books you should read this August.
• When Donald Trump’s assistant cheated in my MFA seminar.
• The fire next time is here: Jesmyn Ward on race in America.
• On the politics of Europe’s new literary superstars: Édouard Louis, Yahya Hassan, and Athena Farrokhzad take on class, race and politics.
• Werner Herzog on volcanoes, North Korea, and the internet: Paul Holdengraber in conversation with the man who once ate his shoe.
• Jade Sharma on the terrible, no good, very bad day she woke up as a debut author.
• An entourage of one: on the road with Stephen King, from Sewickley, PA to Reno, NV.
• Jay McInerney on how Dylan Thomas made him want to be a better writer.
• 20 writers from around the world on the Olympics.
• Six rules for creating an oral history from the original chroniclers of punk.
• A very rare book by one of America’s all-time great athletes: visiting Jim Thorpe‘s $10,000 History of the Olympics.

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