Best of the Week: August 24 – 28, 2015

TODAY: In 1862, Maurice Maeterlinck, Symbolist Nobel Prize winner (in 1911) is born.

• Jonathan Franzen has out-Franzened himself: he claims to have once considered adopting an “Iraqi war orphan” to cure himself of “anger at young people.” | The Guardian
• Give me that/poem: an excerpt from Eileen Myles’s new collection I Must Be Living Twice. | Lamprophonic
• On the legacy of working man Kingsley Amis, writer of macho stories. | The New Republic
• The best in “covertly-sponsored instruments of state power:” literary magazines funded by the CIA during the Cold War, ranked. | The Awl
• More Hamlet than Emma B. or Anna K.: on Hausfrau’s thick fog of psychic pain. | Seattle Review of Books
• On radical librarians, archives, and the quest to catalog inclusively. | Queen Mob’s Teahouse
• Brilliant female novelists vs. the institution of marriage: on the pre- and post-divorce writing of Edith Wharton, Clarice Lispector, and Colette. | The Boston Review
• An interview with Lewis H. Lapham, consummate man of letters, author of over 600 essays, and discoverer of the fountain of youth. | Full Stop
• “The notable difference between black excellence and white excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism.” Claudia Rankine’s profile of Serena Williams. | The New York Times
• How a happy boy made a happy girl: a Sheila Heti story made skeletal by the artist Sara Lautman. | Electric Literature
• Elena Ferrante has “finished this story that [she] thought would never end” and that we all wish wouldn’t. | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• On The Long Gaze Back, a new collection that combines emerging, established, and long-deceased Irish women writers. | The Town Crier
• Elena Ferrante on the literary gynaeceum, the male colonization of our imaginations, and the complexity of friendship. | Vanity Fair
• Dissecting another complex friendship, the relationship between Jonathan Franzen and us. | Vulture
• “I don’t care if you think I’m making you feel uncomfortable. I feel better. And that is important to me.” An interview with Claudia Rankine. | BuzzFeed

And on Literary Hub:

• Booksellers across the country recommend their must-reads for fall. | Literary Hub
• Jill Bialosky on wearing two hats: what it’s like to be both an editor and a writer. | Literary Hub
• Emma Donoghue on helping to make a movie adaptation of her novel, Room: learning the jargon of movie production and trying not to get in the way. | Literary Hub
• Justin Taylor on the total weirdness of the book tour, “the part of the writing life least reconcilable with all of the others.”  Listen to his playlist too. | Literary Hub
• Why are the affluent youth of suburban Chicago throwing themselves in front of trains?  | Literary Hub
• Mylène Dressler learns to surf at 49, battles fear, the ocean, writes about it. | Literary Hub

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