Best of the Week: August 29 – September 2, 2016

TODAY: In 1963, Irish poet Louis MacNeice dies. 

• A preview of fall books coming out from independent presses, including Graywolf, New Directions, and others. | Publishers Weekly
• Welcome to Oliver Sacks Night, Dr. Sacks: Bill Hayes on attending a gay bar’s night honoring his partner. | The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• “I think it’s important for the young people who still live in Harlem to know that in their own neighborhood, blocks away from where they’re playing basketball… that a literary giant lived there.” On potentially transforming Langston Hughes’ home into an art center. | NPR
• “People are always trying to push me off the literary scene, and to hell with it.” A profile of Ursula Le Guin on the occasion of her publication by the Library of America. | The New York Times
• Eimear McBride on deciding she was a writer, the impact of her acting training on her craft, and dealing with James Joyce comparisons. | The Guardian
• “If you write, and you are really alone (writing is a lonely thing), you learn to be alone without suffering.” An interview with Alejandro Zambra. | The Rumpus
• The best essay collections coming out this fall, including books by Teju Cole, Mark Greif, and ten others. | Signature
• In which a very confused Legs McNeil attends a Gilmore Girls book club (thanks to the book lending of Jess Mariano). | The Awl
• Haruki Murakami has been deemed most likely to with the Nobel Prize in Literature, followed by Adunis and Joyce Carol Oates. | Nicer Odds
• She is skeletal. She is fleshless. And that is probably why we yearn to possess her: Visualizing Emily Brontë. | The Hairpin
• “At home, everywhere I looked I now seemed to see a hidden part of myself that was publicly exposed.” Rachel Cusk on serving and erasing the reality of domestic life. | The New York Times Magazine
• Not a boy, not yet a thirty-year-old man: Determining Hamlet’s intended age. | The Times Literary Supplement
• “Her ‘thing’ was not having a ‘thing,’ apart from a roving curiosity, which helps explain both her contemporary appeal and, perhaps, her relative obscurity. “ On the poetry of Bernadette Mayer. | The New Yorker
• Garnette Cadogan on the Flushing Remonstrance, “a reminder to New Yorkers today of the intellectual and moral resources we have to combat the challenges brought on by pluralism—particularly the temptation to harass and persecute people who think or look differently than we do.” | Catapult
• On recent books about revolutionaries Lizzie Burns, Nellie Dowell, Muriel Lester, and Eleanor Marx, whose lives “reveal the centrality of patriarchy to capitalism.” | Public Books

And on Literary Hub:

• I love soap operas (and they made me a better writer): Deborah Shapiro on the genre’s throwback novelistic qualities.
• Ann Patchett on stealing stories, book tours, and staying off twitter.
• Memorializing greatness in sport is as complex as imagining one’s own immortality.
• How I helped Elmore Leonard research Get Shorty.
• DIY, 19th-century style: On the lost art of custom-illustrating your favorite books.
• What does it mean to be a poet in the face of violence? Adriana Ramirez considers black bodies and the metaphors that can hide them.
• On the third anniversary of Seamus Heaney‘s death, the Nobel Laureate on William Wordsworth’s one big truth.
• It’s here, our giant Booksellers Fall Preview! (Because when in doubt, ask a bookseller).
• Becoming a writer means becoming a cliché: Odie Lindsey on quitting a job, moving to Italy, and writing a book.
• Who decides what counts as “English”? Gabrielle Bellot on decolonizing language.
• Lucia Berlin offers writing advice (and more) in this never-before published interview.
• 18 books you should read this September.
• Peter Ho Davies on moving to America and mixing history with invention.
• Michael Koryta on the editor inside his head, a cruel and demanding S.O.B.
• The forgotten history of Florence’s mixed-race Medici, a duke foully murdered.
• How Jorge Luis Borges taught me to embrace my Jewish heritage.
• Franz Nicolay’s dispatches from a punk tour of the Balkans.

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