Best of the Week: August 31 - September 4, 2015

• Oliver Sacks, writer, doctor, and neuropsychological explorer, has died at age 82. | The New York Times
• Their griefs are (not) transient: Claudia Rankine writes to Thomas Jefferson. | The Washington Post
• On the enchanting properties of poetry, a primal form of literature and universal human art. | The Dark Horse
• Praise be: Nell Zink’s review of Purity, basically the same book as A Little Princess, is back online. | n+1
• On enlisting one’s mom to pre-translate the final Neapolitan novel. | The Slate Book Review
• On Graywolf Press, “a scrappy little press that harnessed and to some extent generated a revolution in nonfiction.” | Vulture
• In which Jonathan Franzen utters “Oh pussycat” aloud and shares how he, unlike us, is able to escape himself. | NPR
• Good night papa Hemingway, granpa Ezra, reverend Eliot: a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. | The Baffler
• After a “farcical closed-door trial,” investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova has been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. | PEN America
• Don DeLillo, prolific Contributor to American Letters, has received a National Book award for lifetime achievement. | Flavorwire
• Parsing Very Big Questions with the fathers of one thousand think pieces, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. | BuzzFeed Books
• Bad Mother, Good Art: on Sally Mann’s mind-stretching memoir. | Public Books
• Renata Adler on acquiring a sense of danger, the mundanity of war, and the peril of railroad stations. | Longform
• A rare opportunity to “webchat” with the Queen of Twitter herself, Joyce Carol Oates. | The Guardian
• A grammar lesson on the passive voice, beloved by incompetent police departments across America. | McSweeney’s
• From sharing on Twitter to the Booker longlist: how A Little Life became the year’s sleeper hit. | WSJ

And on Literary Hub:

• Matthew Salesses on the need for diverse diverse books and moving beyond the “single story” from marginalized writers. | Literary Hub
• Learning to write what your MFA advisor would hate: Annie McGreevy and Claire Vaye Watkins on writing for themselves. | Literary Hub
• Mark Andrew Ferguson believes Paul Auster is speaking to him through his books (literally). | Literary Hub
• Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitian novels constitute a single, mighty, modern epic. | Literary Hub
• A writing lesson from Ursula K. Le Guin. | Literary Hub
• A back to school reading list: what writers teach their students. | Literary Hub
• America, nation of immigrants, has foundational literature by immigrants. | Literary Hub