Best of the Week: August 10 – 14, 2015

TOMORROW: In 1920, Charles Bukowski, “laureate of american lowlife” is born in Germany.

• Elena Ferrante’s letter clarifying why she refuses to come forward publicly: “I’ve already done enough for this long story: I wrote it.” | London Review Bookshop
• Kathleen Alcott reflects on “the poverty and itinerancy of [her] childhood” and having stairs for the first time. | BuzzFeed
• The lost story of a meet cute: the recently uncovered account of one woman’s encounter with the 72-year-old W.B. Yeats at a meeting of the Sex Education Society. | The Guardian
• “How white people react is not in my control, and thus can never be in my consideration.” Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay in conversation. | Barnes & Noble Review
• “But neither of the pipes with cocaine came from my garden,” the ghost of Shakespeare protests to the very disappointed scientists who found his weed pipes. | The Independent
• Twitter sage Joyce Carol Oates investigates the motive for metaphor. | NYRB
• It can be like James Joyce out there: on the importance of creating narratives to understand our own existences. | The Atlantic
• “Who needed girls when you could have stuff like this?” On “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem for teens. | The New Republic
• Amitava Kumar describes how Philip Roth, he of “monumental dumbness,” became central to his thinking. | Library of America’s Reader’s Almanac
• A transformation, not a distortion of the truth: Lydia Davis on Lucia Berlin, the mother of auto-fiction. | The New Yorker
• An essay on contemporary novels that T.S. Eliot’s mom forgot to forward to his editor. | The Times Literary Supplement
• Alexandra Kleeman on the fairy polish of MFAs, male fumbling vs. female reflexivity, and pink slime, a non-fictional entity. | The Awl
• What do you do, so I have a context for who you are? On the fine line between potential and failure. | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
• “One never really understands a book unless one copies it.” A collage of quotes offering thoughts on translation. | The Los Angeles Review of Books
• Humanity’s quest for immortality through writing continues, even as the apocalypse looms ever closer. | Cleaver Magazine

And on Literary Hub:

• A decade after Hurricane Katrina, a reading list of fiction and nonfiction from, by, and about the people of the Gulf Coast. | Literary Hub
• One year after Michael Brown’s death, reflections on #BlackLivesMatter from thirteen young, black writers. | Literary Hub
• Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite on their unpublished “drawer novel” plus the novels that won’t see the light of day from Anthony Doerr, Lauren Holmes, and Marlon James. | Literary Hub
• Wendy S. Walters on Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s African Burying Ground and memorializing the unknown dead. | Literary Hub
• Tanwi Nandini Islam on writing about diaspora, the family you choose, and transnational trans characters. | Literary Hub
• Charles Bukowski’s rules for writing: be honest, have a few drinks, submit everything, among other gems. | Literary Hub

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